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THE 
HOHENZOLLERNS 
.-. IN AMERICA .-. 

WITH THE BOLSHEVIKS IN BERLIN 
AND OTHER IMPOSSIBILITIES 



BY STEPHEN LEACOCK 



NEW YORK: 


JOHN 


LANE 


COMPANY 


LONDON: JOHN 


LANE, 


THE BODLEY HEAD 


TORONTO: S. 


. B. GUNDY: 


MCMXIX 



^^f:^' 



i 



^vA 



COPYRIGHT, I919 
BY JOHN LANE COMPANY 



THE-PLIMPTON-PRESS 
NORWOOD-MASS-US-A 



©C1.A515262 
APR l^li'id 



CONTENTS 



V. 



CHAPTES KA6E 

I. The Hohenzollerns in America ... 9 

II. With the Bolsheviks in Berlin ... 73 

III. Afternoon Tea with the Sultan . . 100 

IV. Echoes of the War 115 

1. The Boy Who Came Back .... 117 

2. The War Sacrifices of Mr. Spugg . . 125 

3. If Germany Had Won 136 

4. War and Peace at the Galaxy Club . . 143 

5. The War News as I Remember It . . 153 

6. Some Just Complaints About the War . 164 

7. Some Startling Side Effects of the War . 172 
Oti^er Impossibilities 181 

1. The Art of Conversation 183 

2. Heroes and Heroines 201 

3. The Discovery of America . . . . 215 

4. Politics from Within 232 

5. The Lost Illusions of Mr. Sims . . . 243 

6. Fetching the Doctor 264 



The Hohenzollerns in America 



The Hohenzollerns in America 



PREFACE 

THE proper punishment for the Hohenzollerns y 
and the Hapsburgs, and the Mecklenburgs, 
and the Muckendorfs, and all stcch puppets 
and princelings, is that they should be made to 
work; and not made to work in the glittering and 
glorious sense, as generals and chiefs of stajf, and 
legislators, and land-barons, but in the plain and 
humble part of laborers looking for a job; that they 
should carry a hod and wield a trowel and swing 
a pick and, at the day^s end, be glad of a humble 
supper and a nighfs rest; that they should work, in 
short, as millions of poor emigrants out of Germany 
have worked for generations past; that there should 
be about them none of the prestige of fallen grandeur; 
that, if it were possible, by some trick of magic, or 
change of circumstance, the world should know them 
only as laboring men, with the dignity and divinity 
of kingship departed out of them; . that, as such, they 
should stand or fall, live or starve, as best they might 
by the work of their own hands and brains. Could 

9 



10 The Hohenzollerns in America 

this be done, the world would have a better idea of the 
thin stuff out of which autocratic kingship is fash- 
ioned. 

It is a favourite fancy of mine to imagine this 
transformation actually brought about; and to 
picture the Hohenzollerns as an immigrant family 
departing for America, their trunks and boxes on 
their backs, their bundles in their hands. 

The fragments of a diary that here follow present 
the details of such a picture. It is written, or 
imagined to be written, by the {former) Princess 
Frederica of Hohenzollern. I do not find her name 
in the Almanach de Gotha. Perhaps she does not 
exist. But from the text below she is to be presumed 
to be one of the innumerable nieces of the German 
Emperor, 



The Hohenzollerns in America 11 



CHAPTER I 

On Board tfie S.S. America. Wednesday 

AT last our embarkation is over, and we 
are at sea. I am so glad it is done. 
It was dreadful to see poor Uncle Wil- 
liam and Uncle Henry and Cousin Willie and 
Cousin Ferdinand of Bulgaria, coming up the 
gang-plank into the steerage, with their boxes 
on their backs. They looked so different in 
their rough clothes. Uncle WiUiam is wearing 
an old blue shirt and a red handkerchief round his 
neck, and his hair looks thin and unkempt, and 
his moustache draggled and his face unshaved. 
His eyes seem watery and wandering, and his 
little withered arm so pathetic. Is it possible 
he was always really like that? 

At the top of the gang-plank he stood still a 
minute, his box stiU on his back, and said, "This 
then is the pathway to Saint Helena.'' I heard 
an officer down on the dock call up, "Now then, 
my man, move on there smartly, please." And 
I saw some young roughs pointing at Uncle and 
laughing and saying, "Look at the old guy with 
the red handkerchief. Is he batty, eh?" 



12 The Hohenzollerns in America 

The forward deck of the steamer, the steerage 
deck, which is the only place that we are allowed to 
go, was crowded with people, all poor and with 
their trunks and boxes and paper bags all round 
them. When Uncle set down his box, there was 
soon quite a Httle crowd around him, so that I 
could hardly see him. But I could hear them 
laughing, and I knew that they were "taking 
a rise out of him," as they call it, — just as they 
did in the emigration sheds on shore. I heard 
Uncle say, "Let wine be brought: I am faint;" 
and some one else said, "Yes, let it," and there 
arose a big shout of laughter. 

Cousin WilHe had sneaked away with his box 
down to the lower deck. I thought it mean of 
him not to stay with his father. I never noticed 
till now what a sneaking face Cousin Willie has. 
In his uniform, as Crown Prince, it was different. 
But in his shabby clothes, among these rough 
people, he seems so changed. He walks with a 
mean stoop, and his eyes look about in such 
a furtive way, never still. I saw one of the 
ship's officers watching him, very closely and 
sternly. 

Cousin Karl of Austria, and Cousin Ruprecht 
of Bavaria, are not here. We thought they 
were to come on this ship, but they are not here. 



The Hohenzollerns in America 13 

We could hardly believe that the ship would 
sail without them. 

I managed to get Uncle William out of the 
crowd and down below. He was glad to get off 
the deck. He seemed afraid to look at the sea, 
and when we got into the big cabin, he clutched 
at the cover of the port and said, "Shut it, help 
me shut it, shut out the sound of the sea;'' and 
then for a little time he sat on one of the bunks 
all hunched up, and muttering, "Don't let me hear 
the sea, don't let me hear it." His eyes looked 
so queer and fixed, that I thought he must be in 
a sort of fit, or seizure. But Uncle Henry and 
Cousin WiUie and Cousin Ferdinand came into 
the cabin and he got better again. 

Cousin Ferdinand has got hold of a queer long 
overcoat with the sleeves turned up, and a little 
round hat, and looks exactly like a Jew. He 
says he traded one of our empty boxes for the 
coat and hat. I never noticed before how queer 
and thick Cousin Ferdinand's speech is, and how 
much he gesticulates with his hands when he 
talks. I am sure that when I visited at Sofia 
nobody ever noticed it. And he called Uncle 
WiUiam and Uncle Henry "Mister," and said that 
on the deck he had met two "fine gentlemen," 
(that's what he called them), who are in the 



14 The Hohenzollerns in America 

clothing trade in New York. It was with them 
he traded for the coat. 

Cousin Ferdinand, who is very clever at figures, 
is going to look after aU our money, because the 
American money is too difficult for Uncle William 
and Cousin WiUie to understand. We have only 
a Httle money, but Cousin Ferdinand said that 
we would put it all together and make it a pool. 
But when Uncle Henry laughed, and turned his 
pockets out and had no money at all. Cousin 
Ferdinand said that it would not be a pool. He 
said he would make it "on shares" and explained 
it, but I couldn^t understand what it meant. 

While he was talking I saw Cousin WiUie slip 
one of the pieces of money out of the pile into his 
pocket: at least I think I saw it; but he did it so 
quickly that I was not sure, and didn't like to say 
anything. 

Then a bell rang and we went to eat in a big 
saloon, all crowded with common people, and 
very stuffy. The food was wretched, and I 
could not eat. I suppose Uncle was famished 
from the long waiting and the bad food in the 
emigrant shed. It was dreadful to see the 
hungry way that he ate the greasy stew they 
gave us, with his head down almost in his plate 
and his moustache all unkempt. "This ragout 



The Hohenzollerns in America 15 

is admirable/' he said. "Let the chef be in- 
formed that I said it.'' 

Cousin Ferdinand didn't sit with us. He sat 
beside his two new friends and they had their 
heads all close together and talked with great 
excitement. I never knew before that Cousin 
Ferdinand talked Yiddish. I remember him at 
Sofia, on horseback addressing his army, and I 
don't think he talked to his troops in Yiddish. 
He was telling them, I remember, how sorry he 
was that he couldn't accompany them to the 
front. But for "business in Sofia," he said, he 
would like to be in the very front trenches, the 
foremost of all. It was thought very brave of 
him. 

When we got up from supper, the ship was 
heaving and roUing quite a bit. A yoimg man, 
a steward, told us that we were now out of the 
harbor and in the open sea. Uncle WiUiam 
told him to convey his compliments to the captain 
on his proper navigation of the channel. The 
young man looked very closely at Uncle and said, 
"Sure, I'll tell him right away," but he said it 
kindly. Then he said to me, when Uncle couldn't 
hear, "Your pa ain't quite right, is he, Miss 
Hohen?" I didn't know what he meant, but, 
of course, I said that Uncle WiUiam was only my 



16 The Hohenzollerns in America 

uncle. Hohen is, I should explain, the name by 
which we are known now. The young man said 
that he wasn't really a steward, only just for the 
trip. He said that, because I had a strange feeling 
that I had met him before, and asked him if I 
hadn't seen him at one of the courts. But he 
said he had never been '^up before one" in his 
life. He said he Hves in New York, and drives 
an ice-wagon and is an ice-man. He said he was 
glad to have the pleasure of our acquaintance. 
He is, I think, the first ice-man I have ever met. 
He reminds me very much of the Romanoffs, 
the Grand Dukes of the younger branch, I mean. 
But he says he is not connected with them, so 
far as he knows. He said his name is Peters. 
We have no Almanach de Gotha here on board 
the steamer, so I cannot look up his name. 



S.S. America. Thursday 

We had a dreadful experience last night. In 
the middle of the night Uncle Henry came and 
called me and said that Uncle William was ill. 
So I put on an old shawl and went with him. 
The ship was pitching and heaving with a dreadful 
straining and creaking noise. A dim Hght burned 
in the cabin, and outside there was a great roaring 



The Hohenzollerns in America 17 

of the wind and the wild sound of the sea surging 
against the ship. 

Uncle William was half sitting up in his rough 
bunk, with the tattered gray blankets over him, 
one hand was clutched on the side of the bed and 
there was a great horror in his eyes. "The sea, 
the sea," he kept saying, "don't let me hear it. 
It's their voices. Listen! They're beating at 
the sides of the ship. Keep them from me, 
keep them out!" 

He was quiet for a minute, until there came 
another great rush of the sea against the sides of 
the ship, and a roar of water against the port. 
Then he broke out, almost screaming — "Henry, 
brother Henry, keep them back! Don't let 
them drag me down. I never willed it. I 
never wanted it. Their death is not at my door. 
It was necessity. Henry! Brother Henry! Tell 
them not to drag me below the sea!" 

Like that he raved for perhaps an hour and we 
tried to quiet him. Cousin Willie had slipped 
away, I don't know where. Cousin Ferdinand 
was in his bunk with his back turned. 

"Do I slip to-night, at all," he kept growling 
"or do I not? Say, mister, do I get any shp 
at all?" 

But no one minded him. 



18 The Hohenzollems in America 

Then daylight came and Uncle fell asleep. His 
face looked drawn and gray and the cords stood 
out on his withered hand, which was clutched 
against his shirt. 

So he slept. It seemed so strange. There was 
no court physician, no bulletins to reassure the 
world that he was sleeping quietly. 

Later in the morning I saw the ship's doctor and 
the captain, all in uniform, with gold braid, walk- 
ing on their inspection round. 

"You had some trouble here last night," I 
heard the captain say. 

"No, nothing," the doctor answered, "only 
one of the steerage passengers dehrious in the 
night." 

Later in the morning the storm had gone down 
and the sea was calm as glass, and Uncle Henry 
and I got Uncle WiUiam up on deck. Mr. 
Peters, the steward that I think I spoke about 
before, got us a steamer chair from the first class 
that had been thrown away — quite good except 
for one leg, — and Uncle William sat in it with his 
face away from the sea. He seemed much shaken 
and looked gray and tired, but he talked quite 
quietly and rationally about our going to America, 
and how we must all work, because work is man's 
lot. He himself, he says, will take up the presi- 



The Hohenzollerns in America 19 

dency of Harvard University in New York, and 
Uncle Henry, who, of course, was our own Grand 
Admiral and is a sailor, will enter as Admiral of 
the navy of one of the states, probably, Uncle 
says, the navy of Missouri, or else that of Colorado. 

It was pleasant to hear Uncle WiUiam talk in 
this way, just as quietly and rationally as at 
Berlin, and with the same grasp of pohtical things. 
He only got excited once, and that was when he 
was telling Uncle Henry that it was his particular 
wish that Uncle should go to the captain and offer 
to take over the navigation of the vessel. Uncle 
Henry is a splendid sailor, and in all our cruises 
in the Baltic he used to work out all the navi- 
gation of the vessel, except, of course, the arith- 
metic — which was beneath him. 

Uncle Henry laughed (he is always so good 
natured) and said that he had had enough of 
being Admiral to last him all his Hfe. But when 
Uncle WilHam insisted, he said he would see what 
he could do. 

S.S. America. Friday 

All yesterday and to-day the sea was quite 
calm, and we could sit on deck. I was glad be- 
cause, in the cabin where I am, there are three 
other women, and it is below the water-Hne, and 



20 The Hohenzollerns in America 

is very close and horrid. So when it is rough, I 
can only sit in the alley-way with my knitting. 
There the light is very dim and the air bad. 
But I do not complain. It is woman's lot. Uncle 
William and Cousin Willie have both told me this 
— that it is woman's lot to bear and to suffer; 
and they said it with such complete resignation 
that I feel I ought to imitate their attitude. 

Cousin Ferdinand, too, is very brave about the 
dirt and the discomfort of being on board the 
ship. He doesn't seem to mind the dirt at all, 
and his new friends (Mr. Sheehan and Mr. Mosen- 
hammer) seem to bear it so well, too. Uncle 
Henry goes and washes his hands and face at one 
of the ship's pumps before every meal, with a great 
noise and splashing, but Cousin Ferdinand says, 
*Tor me the pump, no." He says that nothing 
like that matters now, and that his only regret 
is that he did not fall at the head of his troops, 
as he would have done if he had not been detained 
by business. 

I caught sight of Cousin Karl of Austria! So 
it seems he is on the ship after all. He was up on 
the promenade deck where the first class passen- 
gers are, and of which you can just see one end 
from down here in the steerage. Cousin Karl had 
on a waiter's suit and was bringing something to 



The Hohenzollerns in America 21 

drink to two men who were in steamer chairs on 
the deck. I don't know whether he saw me or 
not, but if he did he didn't give any sign of recog- 
nizing me. One of the men gave Cousin Karl a 
piece of money and I was sure it was he, from the 
pecuhar, cringing way in which he bowed. It 
was just the manner that he used to have at 
Vienna with his cousin, Franz Ferdinand, and with 
dear old Uncle Franz Joseph. 

We always thought, we .girls I mean, that it 
was Cousin Karl who had Cousin Franz Ferdinand 
blown up at Serajevo. I remember once we dared 
Cousin Zita, Karl's wife, to ask Uncle William if it 
really was Karl. But Uncle William spoke very 
gravely, and said that it was not a thing for us 
to discuss, and that if Karl did it, it was an "act 
of State," and no doubt very painful to Cousin 
Karl to have to do. 

Zita asked Uncle if Karl poisoned dear old 
Uncle Franz Joseph, because some of Karl's best 
and most intimate friends said that he did. But 
Uncle said very positively, "No," that dear old 
Uncle Franz Joseph had not needed any poison, 
but had died, very naturally, under the hands of 
Uncle William's own physician, who was feeling 
his wind-pipe at the time. 

Of course, all these things seem very far away 



22 The Hohenzollerns in America 

now. But seeing Cousin Karl on the upper deck, 
reminded me of all the harmless gossip and tattle 
that used to go on among us girls in the old days. 

Friday afternoon 

I SAW Cousin Willie on the deck this afternoon. 
I had not seen him all day yesterday as he seems 
to keep out of sight. His eyes looked bloodshot 
and I was sure that he had been drinking. 

I asked him where he had been in the storm 
while Uncle WiUiam was ill. He gave a queer 
sort of leering chuckle and said, " Over there," and 
pointed backwards with his thumb towaj^ds the 
first class part of the ship. Then he said, " Come 
here a minute," and he led me round a corner to 
where no one could see, and showed me a gold 
brooch and two diamond rings. He told me not 
to tell the others, and then he tried to squeeze my 
hand and to pull me towards him, in such a 
horrid way, but I broke away and went back. 
Since then I have been trying to think how he 
could have got the brooch and the rings. But I 
cannot think. 

S.S. America. Saturday 

To-day when I went up on deck, the first thing 
I saw was Uncle Henry. I hardly recognized 



The Hohenzollerns in America 23 

him. He had on an old blue sailor's jersey, and 
was cleaning up a brass rail with a rag. I asked 
him why he was dressed like that and Uncle 
Henry laughed and said he had become an ad- 
miral. I couldn't think what he meant, as I 
never guess things with a double meaning, so 
he explained that he has got work as a sailor for 
the voyage across. I thought he looked very 
nice in his sailor's jersey, much nicer than in the 
coat with gold facings, when he was our High 
Admiral. He reminded me very much of those 
big fair-haired Norwegian sailors that we used 
to see when we went on the Meteor to Flekkefyord 
and Gildeskaale. I am sure that he will be of 
great service to this EngHsh captain, in helping 
to work the ship across. 

When Cousin Ferdinand came up on deck with 
his two friends, Mr. Mosenhammer and Mr. 
Sheehan, he was very much interested in Uncle 
Henry's having got work. He made an arrange- 
ment right away that he would borrow Uncle 
Henry's wages, and that Mr. Sheehan would 
advance them, and he would then add it to our 
capital, and then he would take it and keep it. 
Uncle Henry is to get what is called, in the new 
money, one seventy-five a day, and to get it for 
four days, and Cousin Ferdinand says that comes 



^4 The Hohenzollerns in America 

to four dollars and a quarter. Cousin Ferdinand 
is very quick with figures. He says that he will 
have to take out a small commission for managing 
the money for Uncle Henry, and that later on he 
will teU Uncle Henry how much will be left after 
taking it out. Uncle Henry said all right and 
went on with his brass work. It is strange how 
his clothes seem to change him. He looks now 
just like a rough, common sailor. 

S.S. America. Tuesday 

To-day our voyage is to end. I am so glad. 
When we came on deck Mr. Peters told me that 
we were in sight of land. He told me the names 
of the places, but they were hard and difficult 
to remember, like Long Island and Sandy Hook; 
not a bit like our dear old simple German 
names. 

So we were all told to put our things together 
and get ready to land. I got, out of one of our 
boxes, an old frock coat for Uncle William. 
It is frayed at the ends of the sleeves and it shines 
a Httle, but I had stitched it here and there and it 
looked quite nice. He put it on with a pair of 
gray trousers that are quite good, and not very 
much bagged, and I had knitted for him a red 
necktie that he wears over his blue shirt with a 



The Hohenzollerns in America 25 

collar, called a celluloid collar, that American 
gentlemen wear. 

The sea is so calm that Uncle doesn't mind 
being on deck now, and he even came close to the 
bulwarks, which he wouldn't do all the way across. 
He stood there in quite an attitude with his 
imperfect hand folded into his coat. He looked 
something, but not quite, as he used to look on 
the deck of the Meteor in the Baltic. 

Presently he said, "Henry, your arm!" and 
walked up and down with Uncle Henry. I could 
see that the other passengers were quite impressed 
with the way Uncle looked, and it pleased him. 
I heard some rough young loafers saying, "Catch 
on to the old Dutch, will you? Eh, what?" 

Uncle Henry is going ashore just as he is, in his 
blue jersey. But Cousin Ferdinand has put on a 
bright red tie that Mr. Mosenhammer has loaned 
to him for three hours. 

Cousin Willie only came on deck at the very 
last minute, and he seemed anxious to sHnk 
behind the other passengers and to keep out of 
sight. I think it must have something to do with 
the brooch that he showed me, and the rings. 
His eyes looked very red and bloodshot and his 
face more crooked and furtive than ever. I am 
sure that he had been drinking again. 



26 The Hohenzollerns in America 

I have written the last Hnes of this diary sitting 
on the deck. We have just passed a huge statue 
that rises out of the water, the name of which 
they mentioned but I can't remember, as it was 
not anything I ever heard of before. 

Just think — in a httle while we shall land in 
America! 

CHAPTER II 

City New York. 2nd Avenue 

WE came off the steamer late yesterday 
afternoon and came across the city 
to a pension on Second Avenue where 
we are now. Only here they don't call it a 
pension but a boarding house. Cousin Ferdinand 
and Cousin Willie drove across in the cart with 
our boxes, and Uncle William and Uncle Henry 
and I came on a street car. It cost us fifteen 
cents. A cent is four and one-sixth pfennigs. 
We tried to reckon what it came to, but we 
couldn't; but Uncle Henry thinks it could be 
done. 

This house is a tall house in a mean street, 
crowded and noisy with carts and street-sellers. 
I think it would be better to have all the boarding 
houses stand far back from the street with elm 



The Hohenzollerns in America 27 

trees and fountains and lawns where peacocks 
could walk up and down. I am sure it would be 
much better. 

We have taken a room for Uncle William and 
Uncle Henry on the third floor at the back and a 
small room in the front for me of the kind called 
a hall bedroom, which I don't ever remember see- 
ing before. There were none at Sans Souci and 
none, I think, at any of the palaces. Cousin 
Willie has a room at the top of the house, and 
Cousin Ferdinand in the basement. 

The landlady of this house is very stout and 
reminds me very much of the Grand Duchess of 
Sondersburg-Augustenburg: her manner when 
she showed us the rooms was very like that of 
the Grand Duchess; only perhaps a Httle firmer 
and more authoritative. But it appears that 
they are probably not related, as the landlady's 
name is Mrs. O'Halloran, which is, I think, Scotch. 

When we arrived it was already time for dinner 
so we went downstairs to it at once. The dining- 
room was underground in the basement. It was 
very crowded and stuffy, and there was a great 
clatter of dishes and a heavy smell of food. Most 
of the people were already seated, but there was 
an empty place at the head of one of the tables 
and Uncle William moved straight towards that. 



28 The Hohenzollerns in America 

Uncle was wearing, as I said, his frock coat and 
his celluloid collar and he walked into the room 
with quite an air, in something of the way that 
he used to come into the great hall of the Neues 
Palais at Potsdam, only that in these clothes it 
looked different. As Uncle entered the room he 
waved his hand and said, "Let no one rise!'' I 
remember that when Uncle said this at the big 
naval dinner at Kiel it made a great sensation as 
an example of his ready tact. He realised that 
if they had once risen there would have been 
great difficulty in their order of procedure for 
sitting down again. He was afraid that the same 
difficulty might have been felt here in the boarding 
house. But I don't think it would, and I don't 
think that they were going to stand up, anyway. 
They just went on eating. I noticed one cheap- 
looking young man watching Uncle with a sort 
of half smile as he moved towards his seat. I 
heard him say to his neighbour, "Some scout, 
eh?" 

The food was so plain and so greasy that I 
could hardly eat it. But I have noticed that it 
is a strange thing about Uncle that he doesn't 
seem to know what he eats at all. He takes all 
this poor stuff that they put before him to be the 
same dehcacies that we had at the Neues Palais 



The Hohenzollerns in America 29 

and Sans Souci. "Is this a pheasant?" he asked 
when the servant maid passed him his dish of 
meat. I heard the mean young man whisper, 
"I guess not.'' Presently some hash was brought 
in and Uncle said, "Ha! A Salmi! Ha! excellent!" 
I could see that Mrs. O'Halloran, the landlady, 
who sat at the other end of the table, was greatly 
pleased. 

I was surprised to find — because it is so hard 
to get used to the change of things in our new 
life — that all the people went on talking just 
the same after Uncle sat down. At the palace 
at Potsdam nobody ever spoke at dinner unless 
Uncle WiUiam first addressed him, and then he 
was supposed to give a sort of bow and answer as 
briefly as possible so as not to interrupt the flow 
of Uncle WiUiam's conversation. Generally Uncle 
talked and all the rest listened. His conversa- 
tion was agreed by everybody to be wonderful. 
Princes, admirals, bishops, artists, scholars and 
everybody united in declaring that Uncle William 
showed a range of knowledge and a brilHance of 
language that was Httle short of marvellous. So 
naturally it was a little disappointing at first to 
find that these people just went on talking to one 
another and didn't listen to Uncle William at all, 
or merely looked at him in an inquisitive sort of 



30 The Hohenzollerns in America 

way and whispered remarks to one another. But 
presently, I don't just know how, Uncle began 
to get the attention of the table and one after 
the other the people stopped talking to listen to 
him. I was very glad of this because Uncle was 
talking about America and I was sure that it 
would interest them, as what he said was very 
much the same as the wonderful speech that he 
made to the American residents of BerHn at the 
time when the first exchange professor was sent 
over to the University. I remember that all the 
Americans who heard it said that Uncle told them 
things about their own country that they had 
never known, or even suspected, before. So I 
was glad when I heard Uncle explaining to these 
people the wonderful possibiHties of their coun- 
try. He talked of the great plains of Connecticut 
and the huge seaports of Pittsburg and Colorado 
Springs, and the tobacco forests of Idaho till one 
could just see it all. He said that the Mississippi, 
which is a great river here as large as the Weser, 
should be dammed back and held while a war of 
extermination was carried on against the Indians 
on the other side of it with a view to Christianizing 
them. The people listened, their faces flushed 
with eating and with the close air. Here and 
there some of them laughed or nudged one another 



The Hohenzollerns in America 31 

and said, "Get on to this, will you?'' But I 
remember that when Uncle William made this 
speech in BerHn the Turkish ambassador said after 
it that he now knew so much about America that 
he wanted to die, and that the Shah of Persia 
wrote a letter to Uncle, all in his own writing, 
except the longest words, and said that he had 
ordered Uncle's speech on America to be printed 
and read aloud by all the schoolmasters in Persia 
under penalty of decapitation. Nearly aU of 
them read it. 

Wednesday 

This morning we had a great disappointment. 
It had been pretty well arranged on board the 
ship that Uncle would take over the presidency 
of Harvard University. Uncle Henry and Cousin 
Ferdinand and Cousin Willie had all consented to 
it, and we looked upon it as done. Now it seems 
there is a mistake. First of all Harvard Univer- 
sity is not in New York, as we had always thought 
in Germany that it was. I remember that when 
Uncle Henry came home from his great tour in 
America, in which he studied American institu- 
tions so profoundly, and made his report he said 
that Harvard University was in New York. 
Uncle had this information filed away in our 
Secret Service Department. 



32 The Hohenzollerns in America 

But it seems that it is somewhere else. The 
University here is called Columbia, so Uncle 
decided that he would be president of that. In 
the old days all the great men of learning used to 
assure Uncle that if fate had not made him an 
emperor he would have been better fitted than 
any living man to be the head of a great university. 
Uncle admitted this himself, though he resented 
being compared only to the living ones. 

So it was a great disappointment to-day when 
they refused to give him the presidency. I went 
with him to the college, but I cannot quite imder- 
stand what happened or why they won't give it 
to him. We walked all the way up and I carried 
a handbag filled with Uncle's degrees and diplomas 
from Oxford and all over the world. All the way 
up Uncle talked about the majesty and the 
freedom of learning and what he would do to the 
college when he was made president, and how all 
the professors should sit up and obey him. At 
times he got so excited that he would stop on the 
street and wave his hands and gesticulate so that 
people turned and looked at him. At Potsdam 
we never reaHzed that Uncle was excited all the 
time, and, in any case, with his uniform on and 
his sabre clattering as he walked, it all seemed 
different. But here in the street, in his faded 



The Hohenzollerns in America 33 

frock coat and knitted tie, and with his face 
flushed and his eyes rambhng, people seemed to 
mistake it and thought that his mind was not 
quite right. 

So I think he made a wrong impression when 
we went into the offices of the college. Uncle 
was still quite excited from his talking. *^Let 
the trustees be brought/' he said in a peremptory 
way to the two young men in black frock coats, 
secretaries of some sort, I suppose, who received 
us. Then he turned to me. "Princess,'^ he said, 
"my diplomas !'' He began pulling them out of 
the bag and throwing them on the table in a 
wild sort of way. The other people waiting in 
the room were all staring at him. Then the 
young men took Uncle by the arm and led him 
into an inner room and I went out into the corridor 
and waited. Presently one of the young men 
came out and told me not to wait, as Uncle had 
been sent home in a cab. He was very civil and 
showed me where to go to get the elevated railroad. 
But while I was waiting I had overheard some 
of the people talking about Uncle. One said, 
"That's that same old German that was on 
board our ship last week in the steerage — has 
megalomania or something of the sort, they say, 
and thinks he's the former Emperor. I saw the 



34 The Hohenzollerns in America 

Kaiser once at a review in Berlin, — not much 
resemblance, is there?" 



CHAPTER III 

FOR weeks and weeks I have written nothing 
in my diary because it has been so dis- 
couraging. After Uncle William's offer to 
take over the presidency of Columbia University 
had been refused, he debated with Uncle Henry 
and with Cousin Ferdinand of Bulgaria (who is 
not Hving in our boarding house now but who 
comes over quite often in the evenings) whether 
he would accept the presidency of Harvard. 
Cousin Ferdinand looked up the salary in a book 
and told him not to take it. Cousin Ferdinand 
has little books with all the salaries of people in 
America and he says that these books are fine 
and much better than the Almanach de Gotha 
which we used to use in Europe to hunt people up. 
He says that if he ever goes back to be King of 
Bulgaria again he is going to introduce books 
like these. Cousin Ferdinand is getting very full 
of American ideas and he says that what you 
want to know about a man is not his line of 
descent but his line of credit. And he says that 
the whole King business in Europe has been 



The Hohenzollerns in America 35 

mismanaged. He says that there should have 
been millions in it. I forgot to say in my diary 
sooner that Cousin Ferdinand's two friends, 
Mr. Mosenhammer and Mr. Sheehan, took him 
into their clothing business at once as a sort of 
partner. The reason was that they found that 
he could wear clothes; the effect on the customers 
when they see Cousin Ferdinand walking up and 
down in front of the store is wonderful. Of 
course all kings can wear clothes and in the old 
days in the Potsdam palace we thought nothing 
of it. But Cousin Ferdinand says that the kings 
should have known enough to stop trying to be 
soldiers and to put themselves at the head of the 
export clothing trade. He wishes, he says, that 
he had some of his Bulgarian generals here now 
in their blue coats trimmed with black fur; he 
says that with a little alteration, which he showed 
us how to do, he could have sent them out "on 
the road," wherever that is, and have made the 
biggest boom in gentlemen's winter fur trimmings 
that the trade ever saw. 

Cousin Ferdinand, when he comes over in the 
evenings now, is always beautifully dressed and I 
can notice that Mrs. O'Halloran, the landlady, 
is much impressed with him. I am glad of this 
because we have not yet been able to pay her 



36 The Hohenzollerns in America 

any money and I was afraid she might say some- 
thing about it. But what is stranger is that 
now that Cousin Ferdinand has good clothes, 
Uncle WiUiam and Uncle Henry seem much 
impressed too. Uncle Henry looks so plain and 
common in his sailor's jersey, and Uncle WiUiam 
in his old frock coat looks faded and shabby and 
his face always vacant and wondering. So now 
when Cousin Ferdinand comes in they stand up 
and get a chair for him and listen to his advice on 
everything. 

So, as I said, Cousin Ferdinand looked up the 
salary of the President of Harvard in a book and 
he was strongly against Uncle William's taking 
the position. But Uncle WiUiam says this kind 
of position is the nearest thing in this coimtry to 
what he had in Germany. He thinks that he 
could do for Harvard what he did for Germany. 
He has written out on a big sheet of paper aU the 
things that he caUs the Chief Needs of America, 
because he is always busy like this and never 
still. I forget the whole Ust, especially as he 
changes it every day according to the way that 
people treat Uncle WiUiam on the street, but the 
things that he always puts first are Culture, 
ReUgion, and Light. These he says he can 
supply, and he thought that the presidency of 



The Hokenzollerns in America 37 

Harvard would be the best place to do it from. 
In the end he accepted the position against 
Cousin Ferdinand's advice, or at least I mean he 
said that he would be willing to take it and he 
told Uncle Henry to pack up all his degrees and 
diplomas and to send them to Harvard and say 
that he was coming. 

So it was dreadfully disappointing when all the 
diplomas came back again by the next post. 
There was a letter with them but I didn't see it, 
as Uncle William tore it into fragments and 
stamped on it. He said he was done with Ameri- 
can universities for ever: I have never seen him 
so furious: he named over on his fingers all the 
American professors that he had fed at Berlin, 
one meal each and sometimes even two, — Uncle 
has a wonderful memory for things like that, — 
and yet this was their gratitude. He walked up 
and down his room and talked so wildly and 
incoherently that if I had not known and been 
told so often by our greatest authorities in Ger- 
many how beautifully balanced Uncle William's 
brain is, I should have feared that he was wander- 
ing. 

But presently he quieted down and said with 
deep earnestness that the American universities 
must now go to ruin in their own way. He was 



38 The Hohenzollerns in America 

done with them. He said he would go into a 
cloister and spend his Hfe in quiet adoration, 
provided that he could find anything to adore, 
which, he said, in his station was very doubtful. 
But half an hour later he was quite cheerful 
again, — it is wonderful how quickly Uncle 
William's brain recovers itself, — and said that 
a cloister was too quiet and that he would take a 
position as Governor of a State; there are a 
great many of these in this country and Uncle 
spent days and days writing letters to them and 
when the answers camx in — though some never 
answered at all — Uncle WilHam got into the 
same state of fury as about the Presidency of 
Harvard. So, naturally, each day seemed more 
disappointing than the last, especially with the 
trouble that we have been having with Cousin 
Willie, of which I have not spoken yet, and I was 
getting quite disheartened until last evening, 
when everything seemed to change. 

We all knew, of course, that Uncle Wilham is 
the greatest artist in the world, but no one liked 
to suggest that he should sell his pictures for 
money, a thing that no prince was ever capable 
of doing. Yet I could not but feel glad when 
Uncle decided yesterday that he would stoop to 
make his 'Hving by art. It cost him a great 



The Hohenzollerns in America 39 

struggle to make this decision, but he talked it 
over very fully last night with Uncle Henry, 
after Uncle Henry came home from work, and the 
resolution is taken. 

' Of course. Uncle always had a wonderful genius 
for painting. I remember how much his pictures 
used to be admired at the court at Berlin. I 
have seen some of the best painters stand abso- 
lutely entranced, — they said so themselves, — 
in front of Uncle's canvasses. I remember one 
of the greatest of our artists saying one day to 
Uncle in the Potsdam Gallery, '^Now, which of 
these two pictures is yours and which is Michel 
Angelo's: I never can tell you two apart.'' Uncle 
gave him the order of the Red Swan. Another 
painter once said that if Uncle's genius had been 
developed he would have been the greatest 
painter of modern times. Uncle William, I 
remember, was dreadfully angry. He said it was 
developed. 

So it seemed only natural that Uncle should 
turn to Art to make our living. But he hesitated 
because there is some doubt whether a person of 
noble birth can sell anything for money. But 
Uncle says Tintoretto the great Italian artist 
had two quarterings of nobility, and Velasquez 
had two and a half. 



40 The Hohenzollerns in America 

^ Luckily we have with us among our things 
Uncle^s easel and his paints that he used in BerHn. 
He had always to have special things because he 
doesn't use httle brushes and tubes of colour as 
ordinary artists do, but had a big brush and his 
paint in a tin can, so that he can work more 
quickly. Fortunately we have with us three of 
Uncle's pictures rolled up in the bottom of our 
boxes. He is going to sell these first and after 
that he says that he will paint one or two every 
day. One of the three canvasses that we have is 
an allegorical picture called "Progress" in wliich 
Progress is seen coming out of a cloud in the 
background with Uncle William standing in the 
foreground. Another is called "Modem Science" 
and in this Science is seen crouched in the dark 
in the background and Uncle WiUiam standing 
in the light in the foreground. The other is called 
"Midnight in the Black Forest." Uncle William 
did it in five minutes with a pot of black paint. 
They say it is impressionistic. 

So all the evening Uncle WiUiam and Uncle 
Henry talked about the new plan. It is wonder- 
ful how Uncle William enters into a thing. He 
got me to fetch him his old blue blouse, which 
was with the painting things, and he put it on 
over his clothes and walked up and down the 



The Hohenzollerns in America 41 

room with a long paint-brush in his hand. "We 
painters, my dear Henry," he said, "must not 
be proud. America needs Art. Very good. She 
shall have it.'' 

I could see, of course, that Uncle WiUiam did 
not Hke the idea of selling pictures for money. 
But he is going to make that side of it less objec- 
tionable by painting a picture, a very large 
picture, for nothing and giving it to the big 
MetropoHtan Art Gallery which is here. Uncle 
has already partly thought it out. It is to be 
called the "Spirit of America" and in it the 
Spirit of America will be seen doubled up in the 
background : Uncle has not yet fully thought out 
the foreground, but he says he has an idea. 

In any case he is going to refuse to take any- 
thing more than a modest price for his pictures. 
Beyond that, he says, not one pfennig. 

So this morning Uncle rolled up his three can- 
vasses imder his arm and has gone away to sell 
them. 

I am very glad, as we have but Httle money, 
indeed hardly any except Uncle Henry's wages. 
And I have been so worried, too, and surprised 
since we came here about Cousin WiUie. He 
hardly is with the rest of us at all. He is out all 
night and sleeps in the day time, and often I am 



42 The Hohenzollerns in America 

sure that he has been drinking. One morning 
when he came back to the house at about break- 
fast time he showed me quite a handful of money, 
but wouldn't say where he got it. He said there 
was lots more where it came from. I asked him 
to give me some to pay Mrs. O'HaUoran, but he 
only laughed in his leering way and said that he 
needed it all. At another time when I went up 
to Cousin WiUie's room one day when he was 
out, I saw quite a lot of silver things hidden in a 
corner of the cupboard. They looked like goblets 
and silver dinner things, and there was a revolver 
and a sheath-knife hidden with them. I began 
to think that he must have stolen all these things, 
though it seemed impossible for a prince. I have 
spoken to Uncle WiUiam several times about 
Cousin Willie, but he gets impatient and does not 
seem to care. Uncle never desires very much to 
talk of people other than himself. I think it 
fatigues his mind. In any case, he says that he 
has done for Willie already all that he could. 
He says he had him confined to a fortress three 
times and that four times he refused to have him 
in his sight for a month, and that twice he ban- 
ished him to a country estate for six weeks. 
His duty, he says, is done. I said that I was 
afraid that Cousin Willie had been stealing and 



The Hohenzollerns in America 43 

told him about the silver things hidden in the 
cupboard. But Uncle got very serious and read 
me a very severe lecture. No prince, he said, ever 
stole. His son, he explained, might very well be 
collecting souvenirs as memorials of his residence 
in America: all the Hohenzollerns collected sou- 
venirs: some of our most beautiful art things 
at Potsdam and Sans Souci were souvenirs col- 
lected by our ancestors in France fifty years ago. 
Uncle said that if the Great War had turned out 
as it should and if his soldiers had not betrayed 
him by getting killed, we should have had more 
souvenirs than ever. After that he dismissed 
the subject from his mind. Uncle WilHam can 
dismiss things from his mind more quickly than 
anybody I ever knew. 

The Same Day. Later 

I was so surprised this afternoon, when I 
happened to go down to the door, to see Mr. 
Peters, the ice gentleman that was on the ship, 
with his ice cart delivering ice into the basement. 
I knew that he delivered ice in this part of the 
city because he said so, and I think he had men- 
tioned this street, and two or three times I thought 
I had seen him from the window. But it did 
seem surprising to happen to go down to the 



44 The Hohenzollerns in America 

door (I forget what I went for) at the moment 
that he was there. He looked very fine in his 
big rough suit of overalls. It is not quite like a 
military uniform, but I think it looks better. 
Mr. Peters knew me at once. ''Good afternoon, 
Miss Hohen," he said (that is the name, as I 
think I said, that we have here), "how are all the 
folks?" 

So we talked for quite a little time, and I told 
him about Uncle trying to get work and how hard 
it was and how at last he had got work, or at least 
had gone out to get it, as a painter. Mr. Peters 
said that that was fine. He said that painters 
do well here: he has a lot of friends who are 
painters and they get all the way from sixty to 
seventy-five cents an hour. It seems so odd to 
think of them being paid by the hour. I don't 
think the court artists at home were paid like 
that. It will be very nice if Uncle WilUam can 
mingle with Mr. Peters's artist friends. Mr. 
Peters asked if he might take me out some Sunday, 
and I said that I would ask Uncle William and 
Uncle Henry and Cousin Ferdinand and Cousin 
WiUie and if they all consented to come I would 
go. I hope it was not a forward thing to do. 

I forgot when I was talking of work to say that 
Uncle Henry got work the very second day that 



The Hohenzollerns in America 45 

we were here. He works down at the docks where 
the ships are. I think he supervises the incoming 
and outgoing of the American navy. It is called 
being a stevedore, and no doubt his being an 
Admiral helped him to get it. He hopes to get a 
certificate presently to be a Barge Master, which 
will put him in charge of the canals. But there 
is a very difficult examination to go through and 
Uncle Henry is working for it at night out of a 
book. He has to take up Vulgar Fractions 
which, of course, none of our High Seas Command 
were asked to learn. But Uncle Henry is stooping 
to them. 

So now, I think, everything will go well. 



CHAPTER IV 

UNCLE'S art has failed. It was only 
yesterday that I was writing in my 
memoirs of how cheerful and glad I felt 
to think that Uncle William was going to be able 
to make his Hving by art, and now everything 
is changed again. All the time that Uncle was 
out on his visit to the picture dealers, I was making 
plans and thinking what we would do with the 
money when it came in, so it is very disappointing 



46 The Hohenzollerns in America 

to have it all come to nothing. I don't know 
just what happened because Uncle William never 
gives any details of things. His mind moves too 
rapidly for that. But he came home with his 
pictures still under his arm in a perfect fury and 
raged up and down his room, using very dreadful 
language. 

But after a Httle while when he grew calmer he 
explained to me that the Americans are merely 
swineheads and that art, especially art such as 
his, is wasted on them. Uncle says that he has 
no wish to speak harshly of the Americans, but 
they are pig-dogs. He bears them no ill-will, 
he says, for what they have done and his heart 
is free of any spirit of vengeance, but he wishes 
he had his heel on their necks for about half a 
minute. He said this with such a strange dreadful 
snarl that for the moment his face seemed quite 
changed. But presently when he recovered him- 
self he got quite cheerful again, and said that it 
was perhaps unseemly in him, as the guest of the 
American people, to say anything against them. 
It is strange how Uncle always refers to himself as 
the guest of the American people. Living in 
this poor place, in these cheap surroundings, it 
seems so odd. Often at our meals in the noisy 
dining-room down in the basement, in the speeches 



The Hohenzollerns in America 47 

that he makes to the boarders, he talks of himself 
as the guest of America and he says, "What does 
America ask in return? Nothing. '' I can see 
that Mrs. O'Halloran, the landlady, doesn't like 
this, because we have not paid her anything for 
quite a long time, and she has spoken to me about 
it in the corridor several times. 

But when Uncle WiUiam makes speeches in 
the dining-room I think the whole room becomes 
transformed for him into the banquet room of a 
palace, and the cheap bracket lamps against the 
wall turn into a blaze of light and the boarders are 
all courtiers, and he becomes more and more 
grandiloquent. He waves his hand towards Uncle 
Henry and refers to him as "my brother the 
Admiral," and to me as "the Princess at my 
side.'' Some of the people, the meaner ones, 
begin to laugh and to whisper, and others look 
uncomfortable and sorry. And it is always on 
these occasions that Uncle William refers to 
himself as America's guest, and refers to the 
Americans as the hospitable nation who have 
taken him to their heart. I think that when 
Uncle says this he really believes it; Uncle 
can believe practically anything if he says it 
himself. 

So, as I say, when he came home yesterday, 



48 The Hohenzollerns in America 

after failing to sell his pictures, he was at first 
furious and then he fell into his other mood and 
he said that, as the guest of a great people, he 
had found out at last the return he could make 
to them. He said that he would organise a 
School of Art, and as soon as he had got the idea 
he was carried away with it at once and seized 
a pencil and paper and began making plans for 
the school and drawing up a Hst of the instructors 
needed. He asked first who could be Principal, 
or President, of the School, and decided that he 
would have to be that himself as he knew of no 
one but himself who had the peculiar power of 
organisation needed for it. All the technical 
instructors, he said, must be absolutely the best, 
each one a master in his own line. So he wrote 
down at the top of his hst. Instructor in Oils, and 
reflected a little, with his head in his hand, as to 
who could do that. Presently he sighed and said 
that as far as he knew there was no one; he'd 
have to do that himself. Then he wrote down 
Instructor in Water Colour, and as soon as he had 
written it he said right ofl that he would have to 
take that over too; there was no one else that he 
could trust it to. Then he said, "Now, let me 
see. Perspective, Freehand, and Crayon Work. 
I need three men: three men of the first class. 



The Hohenzollerns in America 49 

Can I get them? I doubt it. Let me think what 
can be done/* 

He walked up and down the room a little with 
his hands behind his back and his head sunk in 
thought while he murmured, "Three men? Three 
men? But Ha! why three? Why not, if suffi- 
ciently gifted, one man?" 

But just when he was saying this there was a 
knock at the door and Mrs. O'Halloran came in. 
I knew at once what she had come for, because 
she had been threatening to do it, and so I felt 
dreadfully nervous when she began to say that our 
bill at the house had gone unpaid too long and 
that we must pay her at once what we owed her. 
It took some time before Uncle William under- 
stood what she was talking about, but when he 
did he became dreadfully frigid and pohte. He 
said, "Let me understand clearly, madame, just 
what it is that you wish to say: do I apprehend 
that you are sa5dng that my account here for our 
maintenance is now due and payable?" Mrs. 
O'HaUoran said yes, she was. And Uncle said, 
"Let me endeavour to grasp your meaning 
exactly: am I correct in thinking that you mean 
I owe you money?" Mrs. O'Halloran said that 
was what she meant. Uncle said, "Let me try 
to apprehend just as accurately as possible what 



50 The Hohenzollerns in America 

it is that you are trying to tell me: is my surmise 
correct that you are implying that it is time that 
I settled up my bill?'' 

Mrs. O'Halloran said, ''Yes," but I could see 
that by this time she was getting quite flustered 
because there was something so dreadfully chilling 
in Uncle's manner: his tone in a way was courtesy 
itself, but there was something in it calculated to 
make Mrs. O'Halloran feel that she had committed 
a dreadful breach in what she had done. Uncle 
William told me afterwards that to mention 
money to a prince is not a permissible thing, and 
that no true Hohenzollern has ever allowed the 
word "bill" to be said in his presence, and that 
for this reason he had tried, out of courtesy, to 
give the woman every chance to withdraw her 
words and had only administered a reprimand to 
her when she failed to do so. Certainly it was a 
dreadful rebuke that he gave her. He told her 
that he must insist on this topic being dismissed 
and never raised again: that he could allow no 
such discussion: the subject was one, he said, 
that he must absolutely refuse to entertain: he 
did not wish, he said, to speak with undue severity, 
but he had better make it plain that if there were 
any renewal of this discussion he should feel it 
impossible to remain in the house. 



The Hohenzollerns in America 51 

While Uncle William was saying all this Mrs. 
O'Halloran was getting more and more confused 
and angry, and when Uncle finally opened the 
door for her with cold dignity, she backed out 
of it and found herself outside the room without 
seeming to know what she was doing. Presently 
I could hear her down in the scullery below, 
ratthng dishes and saying that she was just as 
good as anybody. 

But Uncle William seemed to be wonderfully 
calmed and elevated after this scene, and said 
"Princess, bring me my flute.'' I brought it to 
him and he sat by the window and leaned his 
head out over the back lane and played our dear 
old German melodies, till somebody threw a boot 
at him. The people about here are not musical. 
But meantime Uncle WiUiam had forgotten all 
about the School of Art, and he said no more 
about it. 

Next Day 

To-day a dreadful thing has happened. The 
police have come into the house and have taken 
Cousin WiUie away. He is now in a place called 
The Tombs, and Mr. Peters says that he will be 
sent to the great prison at Sing-Sing. He is to 
be tried for robbery and for stabbing with intent 
to kiU. 



52 The Hohenzollerns in America 

It was very dreadful when they came to take 
him. I was so glad that Uncle WiUiam was not 
here to see it aU. But it was in the morning and 
he had gone out to see a steamship company about 
being president of it, and I was tidying up our 
rooms, because Mrs. O'Halloran won't tidy them 
up any more or let the coloured servant tidy 
them up until we pay her more money. She 
said that to me, but I think she is afraid to say 
it to Uncle WiUiam. So I mean to do the work 
now while Uncle is out and not let him know. 

This morning, in the middle of the morning, 
while I was working, all of a sudden I heard the 
street door open and slam and some one rushing 
up the stairway: and then Cousin WiUie broke 
into the room, all panting and excited, and his 
face grey with fright and gasping out, "Hide me, 
hide me!" He ran from room to room, whining 
and hysterical, and his breath coming in a sort of 
sob, but he seemed incapable of deciding what 
to do. I would have hidden him if I could, but 
at the very next moment I heard the poUcemen 
coming in below, and the voice of the landlady. 
Then they came upstairs, big strong-looking men 
in blue, any one of whom could have choked 
Cousin Willie with one hand. Cousin WiUie ran 
to and fro like a cornered rat, and two of the 



The Hohenzollerns in America 53 

men seized him and then I think he must have 
been beside himself with fear for I saw his teeth 
bite into the man's hand that held him, and one 
of the pohcemen struck him hard with his wooden 
club across the head and he fell limp to the floor. 
They dragged him down the stairway like that and 
I followed them down, but there was nothing 
that I could do. I saw them lift Cousin WiUie 
into a closed black wagon that stood at the street 
door with quite a httle crowd of people gathered 
about it already, all excited and leering as if it 
were a show. And then they drove away with him 
and I came in and went upstairs and sat down 
in Uncle's room but I could not work any more. 
A little later on Mr. Peters came to the house, 
— I don't know why, because it was not for the 
ice as he had his other clothes on, — and he came 
upstairs and sat down and told me about what 
had happened. It seemed a strange thing to 
receive him upstairs in Uncle's bedroom Hke that, 
but I was so upset that I did not think about it 
at the time. Mr. Peters had been on our street 
with his ice wagon when the police came, though 
I did not see him. But he saw me, he said, stand- 
ing at the door. And I think he must have gone 
home and changed his things and come back 
again, but I did not ask him. 



54 The Hohenzollerns in America 

He told me that Cousin Willie had stabbed a 
man, or at least a boy, that was in charge of a 
jewelry shop, and that the boy might die. Cousin 
WiUie, Mr. Peters says, has been stealing jewelry 
nearly ever since we came here and the poHce 
have been watching him but he did not know this 
and so he had grown quite foolhardy, and this 
morning in broad dayhght he went into some sort 
of jewelry or pawn shop where there was only a 
boy watching the shop, and the boy was a cripple. 
Cousin WiUie had planned to hide the things under 
his coat and to sneak out but the boy saw what 
he was doing and cried out, and when Cousin 
WiUie tried to break out of the shop he hobbled 
to the door and threw himself in the way. And 
then it was that Cousin Wilhe stabbed him with 
his sheath-knife, — the one that I had seen in 
his room, — and ran. But already there was a 
great outcry and the people followed on his tracks 
and shouted to the poHce, and so they easily ran 
him down. 

All of this Mr. Peters told me, but he couldn't 
stay very long and had to go again. He says he 
is going to see what can be done for Cousin Willie 
but I am afraid that he doesn't feel very sorry 
for him; but after Mr. Peters had gone I could 
not help going on thinking about it all and it 



The Hohenzollerns in America 55 

seemed to me as if Cousin Willie had not altogether 
had a fair chance in Hfe. Common people are 
brought up in fear of prison and punishment and 
they learn to do what they should. But Cousin 
Willie was brought up as a prince and was above 
imprisonment and things like that. And in any 
case he seemed, when the big men seized hold of 
him, such a paltry and miserable thing. 

Later on in the day Uncle William came home 
and I had to tell him all about Cousin Willie. 
I had feared that he would be dreadfully upset, 
but he was much less disturbed than I had thought. 
Indeed it is quite wonderful the way in which 
Uncle can detach his mind from things. 

I told him that Mr. Peters had said that Cousin 
WiUie must go to Sing-Sing, and Uncle said, "Ha! 
a fortress?" So I told him that I thought it was. 
After that he asked if Cousin WiUie was in his 
uniform at the time, and when I said that he was 
not, Uncle said "That may make it more diffi- 
cult." Of course Cousin Willie has no uniform 
here in America and doesn't wear any, but I 
notice that Uncle William begins to mix up our 
old Hfe with our life here and seems sometimes 
quite confused and wandering; at least other 
people would think him so. He went on talking 
quite a long time about what had happened and 



56 The Hohenzollerns in America 

he said that there is an almost exact precedent 
for the "incident" (that's what he calls it) in the 
Zabem Case. I don't remember much about 
that, as it was years ago, before the war, but 
Uncle WiUiam said that it was a similar case of 
an officer finding himself compelled to pass his 
sword once through a cripple (only once. Uncle 
says) in order to clear himself a way on the 
sidewalk. Uncle quoted a good many other 
precedents for passing swords through civihans, 
but he says that this is the best one. 

In the evening Cousin Ferdinand and Uncle 
Henry came over. Uncle Henry seemed very 
gloomy and depressed about what had happened 
and said very Httle, but Cousin Ferdinand was 
very much excited and angry. He said what is 
the good of all his honesty and his industry if he 
is to be disgraced like this: he asked of what 
use is his uprightness and business integrity if he 
is to have a first cousin in Sing-Sing. He said 
that if it was known that he had a cousin there it 
would damage him with his best trade to an incal- 
culable extent. But later on he quieted down and 
said that perhaps with a certain part of his trade 
it would work the other way. Uncle Ferdinand 
has grown to be much interested in what is called 
here "advertising," — a thing that he says all 



The Hohenzollerns in America 57 

kings ought to study — and he decided, after he 
had got over his first indignation, that Cousin 
Willie being in Sing-Sing would be a very good 
advertisement for him. It might bring him, he 
said, quite a lot of new business; especially if it 
was known that he refused to help Cousin Willie 
in any way or to have anything more to do with 
any of the rest of us, and not to give us any 
money. He said that this was a point of view 
which people could respect and admire. 

So before he went home he said that we must 
not expect to see or hear from him any more, 
unless, of course, things should in some way 
brighten up, in which case he would come back. 



CHAPTER V 

IT is a long time — nearly three months — 
since I have added anything to my memoirs. 
The truth is I find it very hard to write 
memoirs here. For one thing nobody else seems 
to do it. Mrs. O'Halloran tells me that she 
never thinks of writing memoirs at all. At the 
Potsdam palace it was different. We all wrote 
memoirs. Eugenia of Pless did, and CecHia did, 
and I did, and all of us. We all had our memoir 



58 The Hohenzollerns in America 

books with little silver padlocks and keys. We 
were brought up to do it because it helped us to 
reahse how important everything was that we 
did and how important aU the people about us 
were. It was wonderful to reahse that in the 
old hfe one met every day great world figures 
like Prince Rasselwitz-Windischkopf, the Grand 
Falconer of Reuss, and the Grand Duke of Schhtz- 
in-Mein, and Field Marshall Topoff, General-in- 
Chief of the army of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. 
There are no such figures as these in America. 

But another reason for not writing has been 
that things have been going so badly with us. 
Uncle WiUiam still has no work and he seems to 
be getting older and more broken and stranger in 
his talk every day. He is very shabby now in 
spite of all I can do with my needle, but he 
becomes more grandiloquent and consequential 
all the time. Some of the mean looking young 
men at this boarding house have christened him 
''The Emperor" — which seems a strange thing 
for them to have picked upon, and they draw 
him out in his talk, and when they meet him they 
make mock salutes to him which Uncle returns 
with very great dignity. Quite a lot of the 
people on the nearby streets have taken it up and 
when they see Uncle come along they make him 



The Hohenzollerns in America 59 

military salutes. Uncle gets quite pleased and 
flushed as he goes along the street and answers 
the salutes with a sort of military bow. 

He is quite happy when he is out of doors 
explaining to me with his stick the plans he has 
for rebuilding New York and turning the Hudson 
River to make it run the other way. But when 
he comes in he falls into the most dreadful depres- 
sion and sometimes at night I hear him walking 
up and down in his room far into the night. Two 
or three times he has had the same dreadful kind 
of seizures that he had on board the ship when 
we came over, and this is always when there is a 
great wind blowing from the ocean and a storm 
raging out at sea. 

Of course as Uncle has not any work or any 
position, we are getting poorer and poorer. 
Cousin Willie has been sent to the fortress at 
Sing-Sing and Cousin Ferdinand of Bulgaria 
refuses to know us any more, though, from what 
we hear, he is getting on wonderfully well in the 
clothing business and is very soon to open a big 
new store of which he is to be the general manager. 
Cousin Karl is now the Third Assistant Head- 
Waiter at the King George Hotel, and in the 
sphere in which he moves it is impossible for him 
to acknowledge any relationship with us. I 



60 The Hohenzollerns in America 

don't know what we should do but that Uncle 
Henry manages to give us enough of his wages to 
pay for our board and lodging. Uncle Henry has 
passed his Naval Examination and is now ap- 
pointed to a quite high command. It is called a 
Barge Master. They refused to accept his 
certificate of a German Admiral, so he had to 
study very hard, but at last he got his quahfica- 
tion and is now in charge of long voyages on the 
canals. 

I am very glad that Uncle Henry's command 
turned out to be on canals instead of on the high 
seas, as it makes it so much more German. Of 
course Uncle Henry had splendid experience in 
the Kiel Canal all through the four years of the 
war, and it is bound to come in. So he goes away 
now on quite long voyages, often of two or three 
weeks at a time, and for all this time he is in chief 
charge of his barge and has to work out all the 
navigation. Sometimes Uncle Henry takes bricks 
and sometimes sand. He says it is a great 
responsibility to feel oneself answerable for the 
safety of a whole barge-full of bricks or sand. 
It is quite different from what he did in the 
German navy, because there it was only a question 
of the sailors and for most of the time, as I have 
heard Uncle William and Uncle Henry say, we 



The Hohenzollerns in America 61 

had plenty of them, but here with bricks and sand 
it is different. Uncle Henry says that if his 
barge was wrecked he would lose his job. This 
makes it a very different thing from being a royal 
admiral. 

But Uncle William all through the last three 
months has failed first at one thing and then at 
another. After all his plans for seUing pictures 
had come to nothing he decided, very reluctantly, 
that he would go into business. He only reached 
this decision after a great deal of anxious thought 
because, of course, business is a degradation. 
It involves taking money for doing things and 
this. Uncle William says, no prince can consent 
to do. But at last, after deep thought, Uncle 
said, "The die is cast," and sat down and wrote a 
letter offermg to take over the presidency of the 
United States Steel Corporation. We spent two 
or three anxious days waiting for the answer. 
Uncle was very- firm and kept repeating, "I have 
set my hand to it, and I will do it," but I was 
certain that he was sorry about it and it was a 
great rehef when the answer came at last — it 
took days and days, evidently, for them to decide 
about it — in which the corporation said that 
they would "worry along" as they were. Uncle 
explained to me what "worrying along" meant 



62 The Hohenzollerns in America 

and he said that he admired their spirit. But 
that ended all talk of his going into business and 
I am sure that we were both glad. 

After that Uncle WiUiam decided that it was 
necessary for me to marry in a way to restore our 
fortunes and he decided to offer me to a State 
Governor. He asked me if I had any choice of 
States, and I said no. Of course I should not 
have wished to marry a state governor, but I 
knew my duty towards Uncle WiUiam and I 
said nothing. So Uncle got a map of the United 
States and he decided to marry me to the Gov- 
ernor of Texas. He told me that I could have 
two weeks to arrange my supply of household linen 
and my trousseau to take to Texas, and he wrote 
at once to the Governor. He showed me what 
he wrote and it was a very formal letter. I 
think that Uncle's mind gets more and more 
confused as to where he is and what he is and he 
wrote in quite the old strain and I noticed that 
he signed himself, "Your brother, William." 
Perhaps it was on that account that we had no 
answer to the letter. Uncle seemed to forget all 
about it very soon and I was glad that it was so, 
and that I had escaped going to the court of 
Texas. 

All this time Mr. Peters has been very kind. 



The Hohenzollerns in America 63 

He comes to the house with his ice every day and 
sometimes when Uncle Henry is here he comes in 
with him and smokes in the evenings. One day 
he brought a beautiful bunch of chrysanthemums 
for Uncle William, and another day a lovely 
nosegay of violets for Uncle Henry. And one 
Sunday he took us out for a beautiful drive with 
one of his ice-horses in a carriage called a buggy, 
with three seats. Uncle William sat with Mr. 
Peters in the front seat, and Uncle Henry and 
Cousin Ferdinand (it was the last time he came 
to see us) sat behind them and there was a Httle 
seat at the back in which I sat. It was a lovely 
drive and Uncle William pointed out to Mr. 
Peters all the things of interest, and Cousin 
Ferdinand smoked big cigars and told Uncle 
Henry all about the clothing trade, and I Hstened 
to them all and enjoyed it very much indeed. 
But I was afraid afterwards that it was a very 
bold and unconventional thing to do, and perhaps 
Mr. Peters felt that he had asked too much be- 
cause he did not invite me to drive again. 

But he is always very kind and thoughtful. 

One Sunday afternoon he came to see us, 
thinking by mistake that Uncle William and Uncle 
Henry were there, but they weren't, and his 
manner seemed so strange and constrained that 



64 The Hohenzollerns in America 

I was certain that there was something that he 
was trying to say and it made me dreadfully 
nervous and confused. And at last quite sud- 
denly he said that there was something that he 
wanted to ask me if I wouldn't think it a Hberty. 
My breath stopped and I couldn't speak, and 
then he went on to ask if he might lend us twenty- 
five dollars. He got very red in the face when he 
said it and he began counting out the money on 
the sofa, and somehow I hadn't expected that it 
was money and began to cry. But I told Mr. 
Peters that of course we couldn't think of taking 
any money, and I begged him to pick it up again 
and then I began to try to tell him about how 
hard it was to get along and to ask him to get 
work for Uncle William, but I started to cry 
again. Mr. Peters came over to my chair and 
took hold of the arm of it and told me not to cry. 
Somehow his touch on the arm of the chair 
thrilled all through me and though I knew that 
it was wrong I let him keep it there and even let 
him stroke the upholstery and I don't know just 
what would have happened but at that very 
minute Uncle WiUiam came in. He was most 
courteous to Mr. Peters and expressed his apologies 
for having been out and said that it must have 
been extremely depressing for Mr. Peters to find 



The Hohenzollerns in America 65 

that he was not at home, and he thanked him for 
putting himself to the inconvenience of waiting. 
And a Httle while after that Mr. Peters left. 

The Next Day 

Mr. Peters came back this morning and said 
that he had got work for Uncle William. So I was 
deUghted. He said that Uncle will make a first 
class "street man," and that he has arranged 
for a Hne of goods for him and that he has a 
"territory" that Uncle can occupy. He showed 
me a flat cardboard box filled with lead pencils 
and shoe-strings and little badges and buttons 
with inscriptions on them, and he says these are 
what is called a "line," and that Uncle can take 
out this line and do splendidly. I don't quite 
understand yet who makes the appointment to 
be a street man or what influence it takes or what 
it means to have a territory, but Mr. Peters 
explained that there is a man who is retiring from 
being a street man and that Uncle can take his 
place and can have both sides of the Bowery, 
which sounds very pretty indeed. 

At first I didn't understand — because Mr. 
Peters hesitated a good deal in telling me about 
it — that if Uncle gets this appointment, it will 
mean that he will sell things in the street. But 



66 The Hohenzollerns in America 

as soon as I understood this I felt that Uncle 
William would scorn to do anything like this, as 
the degradation would be the same as being 
President of the Steel Corporation. So I was 
much surprised to find that when Uncle came in 
he didn't look at it that way at all. He looked 
at the box of badges and buttons and things, and 
he said at once, "Ha! Orders of Distinction! 
An excellent idea." He picked up a silly Httle 
white button with the motto "Welcome to New 
York," and he said "Admirable! That shall be 
the first class." And there was a Httle lead spoon 
with "Souvenir of the Bowery" that he made the 
second class. He started arranging and re- 
arranging aU the things in the box, just as he 
used to arrange the orders and decorations at 
the Palace. Only those were real things such as 
the Order of the Red Feather, and The Insignia 
of the Black Duck, and these were only poor tin 
baubles. But I could see that Uncle no longer 
knows the difference, and as his fingers fumbled 
among these siUy things he was quite trembhng 
and eager to begin, like a child waiting for 
to-morrow. 



The Hohenzollerns in America 67 



CHAPTER VI 

IT is a year or nearly a year since I wrote in 
my memoirs, and I only add to them now 
because things have happened which mean 
that I shall never write any more. 

Mr. Peters and I were married last autumn. 
He asked me if I would marry him the day that 
he held the arm of my chair in the boarding house 
where we used to Hve. At first I never thought 
that Uncle William would permit it, because of 
the hopeless difference of birth. But it turned 
out that there was no difficulty at all. Uncle's 
mind was always so wonderful that he could find 
a way out of anything provided that he wanted 
to. So he conferred on Mr. Peters an Order that 
raised him right up in birth so that he came level 
with me. Uncle said that he could have lifted 
him higher still if need be but that as I was only, 
in our old life, of a younger branch of the family, 
it was not necessary to Hft Mr. Peters to the very 
top. He takes precedence. Uncle said, just below 
Uncle Henry of Prussia and just above an Arch- 
bishop. 

It is so pleasant to think — now that poor 
Uncle William is gone — that my marriage was 
with his fuU consent. 



68 The Hohenzollerns in America 

But even after Uncle William had given his 
formal consent, I didn't want to get married till 
I could leave him safely. Only he got along so 
well in his "territory" of the Bowery from the 
very start that he was soon quite all right. He 
used to go out every morning with his trayful of 
badges and pencils and shoe-strings and he was 
a success at once. All the people got to know him 
by sight and they would say when they saw him, 
"Here comes the Emperor," or "Here comes 
Old Dutch," and very often there would be quite 
a httle crowd round him buying his things. 
Uncle regarded himself always as conferring a 
great dignity on any one that he sold a badge to, 
but he was very capricious and he had certain 
buttons and badges that he would only part with 
as a very special favour and honour. Uncle got 
on so fast that presently Cousin Ferdinand 
decided that it would be all right to know him 
again and so he came over and made a reconcilia- 
tion and took away Uncle's money, — it was all 
in small coins, — in a bag to invest for him. 

So when everything was all right with Uncle 
WilHam, Mr. Peters and I were married and it 
was on our wedding morning that Uncle con- 
ferred the Order on my husband which made me 
very proud. That was a year ago, and since 



The Hohenzollerns in America 69 

then we have Hved in a very fine place of our 
own with four rooms, all to ourselves, and a 
gallery at the back. I have cooked all the meals 
and done all the work of our apartment, except 
just at the time when our little boy was born. 
We both think he is a very wonderful child. 
At first I wanted to call him after the Hohen- 
zollerns and to name him William Frederick 
Charles Mary Augustus Francis Felix, but some- 
how it seemed out of place and so we have called 
him simply Joe Peters. I think it sounds better. 
Uncle William drew up an act of abnegation of 
Joe, whereby he gives up all claim to a reversion 
of the throne of Prussia, Brunswick and Waldeck. 
I was sorry for this at first but Uncle said that 
all the Hohenzollerns had done it and had made 
just as great a sacrifice as Joe has in doing it. 
But my husband says that under the constitution 
of the United States, Joe can be President, which 
I think I will like better. 

It was one day last week that Uncle WiUiam 
met with the accident that caused his death. 
He had walked far away from his ^ Herri tory'^ up 
to where the Great Park is, because in this lovely 
spring weather he liked to wander about. And 
he came to where there was a great crowd of 
people gathered to see the unveiUng of a new 



70 The Hohenzollerns in America 

monument. It is called the Lusitania Monument 
and it is put up in memory of the people that 
were lost when one of our war boats fought the 
Enghsh cruiser Lusitania. There were a lot of 
soldiers lining the streets and regiments of cavalry 
riding between. And it seems that when Uncle 
Wilham saw the crowd and the soldiers he was 
drawn nearer and nearer by a sort of curiosity, 
and when he saw the great white veil drawn 
away from the monument, and read the word 
"Lusitania" that is carved in large letters across 
the base, he screamed out in a sudden fear, and 
dashed among the horses of the cavalry and was 
ridden down. 

They carried him to the hospital, but he never 
spoke again, and died on the next day but one. 
My husband would not let me go to see him, as 
he was not conscious and it could do no good, but 
after Uncle William was dead they let me see him 
in his coffin. 

Lying there he seemed such a pitiful and 
ghastly lump of clay that it seemed strange that 
he could, in his old Hfe, have vexed the world as 
he did. 

I had thought that when Uncle William died 
there would have been long accounts of him in 
the papers; at least I couldn't help thinking so, 



The Hohenzollerns in America 71 

by a sort of confusion of mind, as it is hard to get 
used to things as they are and to remember that 
our other life is unknown here and that we are 
known only as ourselves. 

But though I looked in all the papers I could 
find nothing except one little notice, which I cut 
out of an evening paper and which I put in here 
as a conclusion to my memoirs. 

THE ^^ EMPERORS' DEAD 

Unique Character of the East Side Passes Away 



A unique and interesting character, a familiar 
figure of the East Side of the City, has been lost from 
our streets with the death of William Hohen last 
Thursday in the Pauper Hospital, to which he had 
been brought as the restdt of injuries sustained in a 
street accident at the Lusitania celebration. Hohen, 
who was about sixty-five years of age, was an im- 
migrant out of Germany after the troubles of the 
Great War. He had been for a year or more a 
street pedler on the Bowery, where he sold souvenir 
buttons and various little trinkets. The old man 
appears to have been the victim of a harmless hallu- 
cination whereby he thought himself a person of 
Royal distinction and in his fancy converted the 



72 The Hohenzollerns in America 

box of wares that he carried into Orders of Chivalry 
and decorations of Knighthood. The effect of this 
strange fancy was heightened by an attempt at 
military bearing which, comic though it was in so 
old and ragged a figure, was not without a touch of 
pathos. Some fancied resemblance to the former 
Kaiser had earned for Hohen the designation of the 
^' Emperor,'^ of which he appeared inordinately 
proud. But those who knew Hohen by sight assure 
us that the resemblance to the former ruler of Germany, 
who with all his faults made a splendid and impos- 
ing appearance, was of a purely superficial char- 
acter. It would, alas! have been well for the world 
if the lot of William Hohenzollern had fallen on the 
lines of the simple and pathetic ^^ Emperor ^^ of the 
Bowery. 



//. — With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 



//. — With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 



"F 



WO years ago as my readers will remem- 
- ber, — but of course they don't, — I 

-*" made a secret visit to Germany during 
the height of the war. It was obviously quite 
impossible at that time to disclose the means 
whereby I made my way across the frontier. I 
therefore adopted the famihar Uterary device of 
professing to have been transported to Germany 
in a dream. In that state I was supposed to be 
conducted about the country by my friend Count 
Boob von Boobenstein, whom I had known years 
before as a waiter in Toronto, to see GERMANY 
FROM WITHIN, and to report upon it in the 
Allied press. 

What I wrote attracted some attention. So 
the German Government — feeling, perhaps, that 
the prestige of their own spy system was at stake 
— pubhshed a white paper, — or a green paper, — 
I forget which, — in denial of all my adventures 
and disclosures. In this they proved (i) that all 
entry into Germany by dreams had been ex- 

75 



76 The Hohenzollerns in America 

pressly forbidden of the High General Command; 
(2) that astral bodies were prohibited and (3) that 
nobody else but the Kaiser was allowed to have 
visions. They claimed therefore (i) that my 
article was a fabrication and (2) that for all they 
knew it was humorous. There the matter ended 
until it can be taken up at the General Peace 
Table. 

But as soon as I heard that the People's Revolu- 
tion had taken place in Berlin I determined to 
make a second visit. 

This time I had no difficulty about the frontier 
whatever. I simply put on the costume of a 
British admiral and walked in. 

"Three Cheers for the British Navy!" said the 
first official whom I met. He threw his hat in 
the air and the peasants standing about raised a 
cheer. It was my first view of the marvellous 
adaptability of this great people. I noticed that 
many of them were wearing httle buttons with 
pictures of Jellicoe and Beatty. 

At my own request I was conducted at once to 
the nearest railway station. 

"So your Excellency wishes to go to Berhn?" 
said the stationmaster. 

"Yes/' I replied, "I want to see something of 
the people's revolution." 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 77 

The stationmaster looked at his watch. 

"That Revolution is over/' he said. 

"Too bad!" I exclaimed. 

"Not at all. A much better one is in progress, 
quite the best Revolution that we have had. It 
is called — Johann, hand me that proclamation 
of yesterday — the Workmen and Soldiers Revolu- 
tion." 

"What's it about?" I asked. 

"The basis of it," said the stationmaster, "or 
what we Germans call the Fundamental Ground 
Foundation, is universal love. They hanged all 
the leaders of the Old Revolution yesterday." 

"When can I get a train?" I inquired. 

"Your Excellency shall have a special train at 
once. Sir," he continued with a sudden burst of 
feehng, while a tear swelled in his eye. "The 
sight of your uniform calls forth all our gratitude. 
My three sons enlisted in our German Navy. 
For four years they have been at Kiel, comfortably 
fed, playing dominos. They are now at home all 
safe and happy. Had your brave navy relaxed 
its vigilance for a moment those boys might have 
had to go out on the sea, a thing they had never 
done. Please God," concluded the good old man, 
removing his hat a moment, "no German sailor 
now will ever have to go to sea." 



78 The Hohenzollerns in America 

I pass over my journey to Berlin. Interesting 
and varied as were the scenes through which I 
passed they gave me but Httle hght upon the 
true situation of the country: indeed I may say 
without exaggeration that they gave me as httle 
— or even more so — as the press reports of our 
talented newspaper correspondents. The food 
situation seemed particularly perplexing. A well- 
to-do merchant from Bremen who travelled for 
some distance in my train assured me that there 
was plenty of food in Germany, except of course 
for the poor. Distress, he said, was confined 
entirely to these. Similarly a Prussian gentleman 
who looked very like a soldier, but who assured 
me with some heat that he was a commercial 
traveller, told me the same thing: There were no 
cases of starvation, he said, except among the 
very poor. 

The aspect of the people too, at the stations 
and in the towns we passed, puzzled me. There 
were no uniforms, no soldiers. But I was amazed 
at the number of commercial travellers, Lutheran 
ministers, photographers, and so forth, and the 
odd resemblance they presented, in spite of their 
innocent costumes, to the arrogant and ubiquitous 
military officers whom I had observed on my 
former visit. 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 79 

But I was too anxious to reach Berlin to pay 
much attention to the details of my journey. 

Even when I at last reached the capital, I 
arrived as I had feared, too late. 

"Your Excellency," said a courteous official 
at the railway station, to whom my naval uniform 
acted as a sufficient passport. "The Revolution 
of which you speak is over. Its leaders were 
arrested yesterday. But you shall not be disap- 
pointed. There is a better one. It is called the 
Comrades' Revolution of the Bolsheviks. The 
chief Executive was installed yesterday." 

"Would it be possible for me to see him?" I 
asked. 

"Nothing simpler, Excellency," he continued 
as a tear rose in his eye. "My four sons, — " 

"I know," I said; "your four sons are in the 
German Navy. It is enough. Can you take 
me to the Leader?" 

"I can and wiU," said the official. "He is 
sitting now in the Free Palace of all the German 
People, once usurped by the HohenzoUern Tyrant. 
The doors are guarded by machine guns. But I 
can take you direct from here through a back 
way. Come." 

We passed out from the station, across a street 
and through a maze of Httle stairways, and pass- 



80 The Hohenzollerns in America 

ages into the heart of the great building that had 
been the offices of the Imperial Government. 

"Enter this room. Do not knock/' said my 
guide. "Good bye.'' 

In another moment I found myself face to face 
with the chief comrade of the Bolsheviks. 

He gave a sudden start as he looked at me, but 
instantly collected himself. 

He was sitting with his big boots up on the 
mahogany desk, a cigar at an edgeways angle in 
his mouth. His hair under his sheepskin cap 
was shaggy, and his beard stubbly and unshaven. 
His dress was slovenly and there was a big knife 
in his belt. A revolver lay on the desk beside 
him. I had never seen a Bolshevik before but I 
knew at sight that he must be one. 

"You say you were here in Berlin once before?" 
he questioned, and he added before I had time to 
answer: "When you speak don't call me ^Ex- 
cellency' or ^Sereneness' or anything of that 
sort; just call me ^brother' or ^comrade.' This 
is the era of freedom. You're as good as I am, 
or nearly." 

"Thank you," I said. 

"Don't be so damn polite," he snarled. "No 
good comrade ever says ^ thank you.' So you 
were here in Berlin before? " 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 81 

^^Yes," I answered, ''I was here writing up 
Germany from Within in the middle of the war." 

''The war, the war!'' he murmured, in a sort 
of wail or whine. ''Take notice, comrade, that 
I weep when I speak of it. If you write anything 
about me be sure to say that I cried when the 
war was mentioned. We Germans have been so 
misjudged. When I think of the devastation of 
France and Belgium I weep." 

He drew a greasy, red handkerchief from his 
pocket and began to sob. "To think of the loss 
of all those English merchant ships!" 

"Oh, you needn't worry," I said, "it's all going 
to be paid for." 

"Oh I hope so, I do hope so," said the Bolshevik 
chief. "What a regret it is to us Germans to 
think that unfortunately we are not able to help 
pay for it; but you English — you are so generous 

— how much we have admired your noble hearts 

— so kind, so generous to the vanquished. ..." 
His voice had subsided into a sort of whine. 
But at this moment there was a loud knocking 

at the door. The Bolshevik hastily wiped the 
tears from his face and put away his handkerchief. 

"How do I look?" he asked anxiously. "Not 
humane, I hope? Not soft?" 

"Oh, no," I said, "quite tough." 



82 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"That's good," he answered. "That's good. 
But am I tough enough?'^ 

He hastily shoved his hands through his hair. 

"Quick," he said, "hand me that piece of chew- 
ing tobacco. Now then. Come in!" 

The door swung open. 

A man in a costume much like the leader's 
swaggered into the room. He had a bundle of 
papers in his hands, and seemed to be some sort 
of military secretary. 

"Ha! comrade!" he said, with easy famiharity. 
"Here are the death warrants!" 

"Death warrants!" said the Bolshevik. "Of 
the leaders of the late Revolution? Excellent! 
And a good bundle of them! One moment while 
I sign them." 

He began rapidly signing the warrants, one 
after the other. 

"Comrade," said the secretary in a surly tone, 
"you are not chewing tobacco!" 

"Yes I am, yes I am," said the leader, "or, at 
least, I was just going to." 

He bit a huge piece out of his plug, with what 
seemed to me an evident distaste, and began to 
chew furiously. 

"It is well," said the other. "Remember, 
comrade, that you are watched. It was reported 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 83 



last night to the Executive Committee of the 
Circle of the Brothers that you chewed no tobacco 
all day yesterday. Be warned, comrade. This 
is a free and independent repubhc. We will 
stand for no aristocratic nonsense. But whom 
have you here?'' he added, breaking off in his 
speech, as if he noticed me for the first time. 
"What dog is this?'' 

''Hush," said the leader, ''he is a representative 
of the foreign press, a newspaper reporter." 

"Your pardon," said the secretary. "I took 
you by your dress for a prince. A representative 
of the great and enlightened press of the Allies, I 
presume. How deeply we admire in Germany 
the press of England! Let me kiss you." 

"Oh, don't trouble," I said, "it's not worth 
while." 

"Say, at least, when you write to your paper, 
that I offered to kiss you, will you not?" 

Meantime, the leader had finished signing the 
papers. The secretary took them and swung on 
his heels with something between a military bow 
and a drunken swagger. "Remember, comrade," 
he said in a threatening tone as he passed out, 
"you are watched." 

The Bolshevik leader looked after him with 
something of a shudder. 



84 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"Excuse me a moment/' he said, "while I go 
and get rid of this tobacco." 

He got up from his chair and walked away 
towards the door of an inner room. As he did 
so, there struck me something strangely famiUar 
in his gait and figure. Conceal it as he might, 
there was still the stiff wooden movement of a 
Prussian general beneath his assumed swagger. 
The poise of his head still seemed to suggest the 
pointed helmet of the Prussian. I could without 
effort imagine a military cloak about his shoulders 
instead of his Bolshevik sheepskin. 

Then, all in a moment, as he re-entered the 
room, I recalled exactly who he was. 

"My friend," I said, reaching out my hand, 
"pardon me for not knowing you at once. I 
recognize you now. ..." 

"Hush," said the Bolshevik. "Don't speak! 
I never saw you in my life." 

"Nonsense," I said, "I knew you years ago in 
Canada when you were disguised as a waiter. 
And you it was who conducted me through Ger- 
many two years ago when I made my war visit. 
You are no more a Bolshevik than I am. You 
are General Count Boob von Boobenstein." 

The general sank down in his chair, his face 
pale beneath its plaster of rouge. 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 85 

"Hush!" he said. "If they learn it, it is 
death." 

"My dear Boob," I said, "not a word shall pass 
my Hps." 

The general grasped my hand. "The true 
spirit," he said, "the true English comradeship; 
how deeply we admire it in Germany!" 

"I am sure you do," I answered. "But tell 
me, what is the meaning of all this? Why are 
you a Bolshevik? " 

"We all are," said the count, dropping his 
assumed rough voice, and speaking in a tone of 
quiet melancholy. "It's the only thing to be. 
But come," he added, getting up from his chair, 
"I took you once through Berlin in war time. 
Let me take you out again and show you Berlin 
under the Bolsheviks." 

"I shall be only too happy," I said. 

"I shall leave my pistols and knives here," said 
Boobenstein, "and if you will excuse me I shall 
change my costume a little. To appear as I am 
would excite too much enthusiasm. I shall walk 
out with you in the simple costume of a gentleman. 
It's a risky thing to do in Berlin, but I'll chance 
it." 

The count retired, and presently returned 
dressed in the quiet bell-shaped purple coat, the 



86 The Hohenzollerns in America 

simple scarlet tie, the pea-green hat and the white 
spats that mark the German gentleman all the 
world over. 

'^ Bless me, Coimt,'^ I said, "you look just like 
Bernstorff.'^ 

"Hush," said the count. "Don't mention 
him. He's here in Berlin." 

"What's he doing?" I asked. 

"He's a Bolshevik; one of our leaders; he's 
just been elected president of the Scavengers 
Union. They say he's the very man for it. But 
come along, and, by the way, when we get into 
the street talk English and only EngHsh. There's 
getting to be a prejudice here against German." 

We passed out of the door and through the 
spacious corridors and down the stairways of the 
great building. All about were little groups of 
ferocious looking men, dressed like stage Russians, 
all chewing tobacco and redolent of alcohol. 

"Who are all these people?" I said to the count 
in a low voice. 

"Bolsheviks," he whispered. "At least they 
aren't really. You see that group in the corner?" 

"The ones with the long knives," I said. 

"Yes. They are, or at least they were, the 
orchestra of the Berlin Opera. They are now the 
Bolshevik Music Commission. They are here 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 87 

this morning to see about getting their second 
violinist hanged." 

"Why not the first?'' I asked. 

"They had him hanged yesterday. Both cases 
are quite clear. The men undoubtedly favoured 
the war: one, at least, of them openly spoke in 
disparagement of President Wilson. But come 
along. Let me show you our new city." 

We stepped out upon the great square which 
faced the building. How completely it was 
changed from the BerHn that I had known! 
My attention was at once arrested by the new 
and glaring signboards at the shops and hotels, 
and the streamers with mottos suspended across 
the streets. I reahsed as I read them the mar- 
vellous adaptability of the German people and 
their magnanimity towards their enemies. Con- 
spicuous in huge lettering was HOTEL PRESI- 
DENT WILSON, and close beside it CABARET 
QUEEN MARY: ENGLISH DANCING. The 
square itself, which I remembered as the Kaiser- 
platz, was now renamed on huge signboards 
GRAND SQUARE OF THE BRITISH NAVY. 
Not far off one noticed the RESTAURANT 
MARSHAL FOCH, side by side with the 
ROOSEVELT SALOON and the BEER GAR- 
DEN GEORGE V. 



88 The Hohenzollerns in America 

But the change in the appearance and costume 
of the men who crowded the streets was even 
more notable. The uniforms and the pointed 
hehnets of two years ago had vanished utterly. 
The men that one saw retained indeed their 
German stoutness, their flabby faces, and their 
big spectacles. But they were now dressed for 
the most part in the costume of the Russian 
Monjik, while some of them appeared in American 
wideawakes and Kentucky frock coats, or in 
English stove-pipe hats and morning coats. A 
few of the stouter were in Highland costume. 

"You are amazed,'^ said Boobenstein as we 
stood a moment looking at the motley crowd. 

"What does it mean?" I asked. 

"One moment," said the count. "I will first 
summon a taxi. It will be more convenient to 
talk as we ride." 

He whistled and there presently came lumber- 
ing to our side an ancient and decrepit vehicle 
which would have excited my laughter but for 
the seriousness of the count's face. The top of 
the conveyance had evidently long since been 
torn off leaving, only the frame: the copper 
fastenings had been removed: the tires were 
gone: the doors were altogether missing. 

"Our new 1919 model," said the count. "Ob- 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 89 

serve the absence of the old-fashioned rubber 
tires, still used by the less progressive peoples. 
Our chemists found that riding on rubber was 
bad for the eye-sight. Note, too, the time saved 
by not having any doors." 

"Admirable," I said. 

We seated ourselves in the crazy conveyance, 
the. count whispered to the chauffeur an address 
which my ear failed to catch and we started off 
at a lumbering pace along the street. 

"And now tell me, Boobenstein," I said, "what 
does it all mean, the foreign signs and the strange 
costumes?" 

"My dear sir" he replied, "it is merely a further 
proof of our German adaptability. Having failed 
to conquer the world by war we now propose to 
conquer it by the arts of peace: Those people, 
for example, that you see in Scotch costumes are 
members of our Highland Mission about to start 
for Scotland to carry to the Scotch the good news 
that the war is a thing of the past, that the 
German people forgive all wrongs and are prepared 
to offer a line of manufactured goods as per 
catalogue sample." 

"Wonderful," I said. 

"Is it not?" said Von Boobenstein. "We call 
it the From Germany Out movement. It is being 



90 The Ilohenzollerns in America 

organised in great detail by our Step from Under 
Committee. They claim that already four million 
German voters are pledged to forget the war and 
to forgive the Allies. All that we now ask is to 
be able to put our hands upon the villains who 
made this war, no matter how humble their 
station may be, and execute them after a fair 
trial or possibly before." 

The count spoke with great sincerity and 
earnestness. "But come along/' he added. "I 
want to drive you about the city and show 
you a few of the leading features of our new 
national reconstruction. We can talk as we 

go." 

"But Von Boobenstein," I said, "you speak 
of the people who made the war; surely you were 
all in favour of it?" 

"In favour of it! We were all against it." 

"But the Kaiser," I protested. 

"The Kaiser, my poor master ! How he worked 
to prevent the war! Day and night; even before 
anybody else had heard of it. 'Boob,' he said to 
me one day mth tears in his eyes, 'this war must 
be stopped.' 'Which war, your Serenity,' I 
asked. 'The war that is coming next month,' 
he answered, 'I look to you. Count Boobenstein,' 
he continued, 'to bear witness that I am doing 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 91 

my utmost to stop it a month before the EngHsh 
Government has heard of it.' " 

While we were thus speaking our taxi had 
taken us out of the roar and hubbub of the main 
thoroughfare into the quiet of a side street. It 
now drew up at the door of an unpretentious 
dwelling in the window of which I observed a 
large printed card with the legend 

REVEREND MR. TIBBITS 

Private Tuition, English, Navigation, and other 
Branches 

We entered and were shown by a servant into 
a little front room where a venerable looking 
gentleman, evidently a Lutheran minister, was 
seated in a comer at a writing table. He turned 
on our entering and at the sight of the uniform 
which I wore jumped to his feet with a vigorous 
and unexpected oath. 

"It is all right, Admiral,'' said Count Von 
Boobenstein. '^My friend is not reaUy a sailor.'^ 

"Ah!" said the other. "You must excuse 
me. The sight of that uniform always gives me 
the jimips." 

He came forward to shake hands and as the 
light feU upon him I recognized the grand old 



92 The Hohenzollerns in America 

seaman, perhaps the greatest sailor that Germany 
has ever produced or ever will, Admiral Von 
Tirpitz. 

''My dear Admiral!'' I said, warmly. "I 
thought you were out of the country. Our papers 
said that you had gone to Switzerland for a rest." 

"No," said the Admiral. "I regret to say 
that I find it impossible to get away." 

"Your Allied press," interjected the count, 
"has greatly maligned our German patriots by 
reporting that they have left the country. Where 
better could they trust themselves than in the 
bosom of their own people? You noticed the 
cabman of our taxi? He was the former chan- 
cellor Von Hertling. You saw that stout woman 
with the apple cart at the street corner? Frau 
Bertha Krupp Von Bohlen. All are here, helping 
to make the new Germany. But come, Admiral, 
our visitor here is much interested in our plans 
for the restoration of the Fatherland. I thought 
that you might care to show him your designs for 
the new German Navy." 

"A new navy!" I exclaimed, while my voice 
showed the astonishment and admiration that I 
felt. Here was this gallant old seaman, having 
just lost an entire navy, setting vigorously to 
work to make another. "But how can Germany 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 93 

possibly find the money in her present state for 
the building of new ships?" 

"There are not going to be any ships," said the 
great admiral. "That was our chief mistake in 
the past in insisting on having ships in the navy. 
Ships, as the war has shown us, are quite un- 
necessary to the German plan; they are not part 
of what I may call the German idea. The new 
navy will be built inland and elevated on piles 
and will consist — " 

But at this moment a great noise of shouting 
and sudden tumult could be heard as if from the 
street. 

"Some one is coming," said the admiral 
hastily. "Reach me my Bible." 

"No, no," said the count, seizing me by the 
arm. "The sound comes from the Great Square. 
There is trouble. We must hasten back at once." 

He dragged me from the house. 

We perceived at once, as soon as we came into 
the main street again, from the excited demeanour 
of the crowd and from the anxious faces of people 
running to and fro that something of great mo- 
ment must be happening. 

Everybody was asking of the passer-by, "What 
is loose? What is it?" Ramshack taxis, similar 
to the one in which we had driven, forced their 



94 The Hohenzollerns in America 

way as best they could through the crowded 
thoroughfare, moving evidently in the direction 
of the government buildings. 

"Hurry, hurry!'' said Von Boobenstein, clutch- 
ing me by the arm, "or we shall be too late. 
It is as I feared." 

"What is it?'' I said; "what's the matter?" 

"Fool that I was," said the count, "to leave 
the building. I should have known. And in 
this costume I am helpless." 

We made our way as best we could through the 
crowd of people, who all seemed moving in the 
same direction, the count, evidently a prey 
to the gravest anxiety, talking as if to himself and 
imprecating his own carelessness. 

We turned the corner of a street and reached 
the edge of the great square. It was fiUed with 
a vast concourse of people. At the very moment 
in which we reached it a great burst of cheering 
rose from the crowd. We could see over the 
heads of the people that a man had appeared 
on the balcony of the Government Building, 
holding a paper in his hand. His appearance was 
evidently a signal for the outburst of cheers, 
accompanied by the waving of handkerchiefs. 
The man raised his hand in a gesture of authority. 
German training is deep. Silence fell instantly 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 95 

upon the assembled populace. We had time in 
the momentary pause to examine, as closely as 
the distance permitted, the figure upon the bal- 
cony. The man was dressed in the blue overall 
suit of a workingman. He was bare-headed. 
His features, so far as we could tell, were 
those of a man well up in years, but his frame was 
Tugged and powerful. Then he began to speak. 

"Friends and comrades!" he called out in a 
great voice that resounded through the square. 
"I have to announce that a New Revolution has 
been completed." 

A wild cheer woke from the people. 

"The Bolsheviks' Repubhc is overthrown. The 
Bolsheviks are aristocrats. Let them die." 

"Thank Heaven for this costume!" I heard 
Count Boobenstein murmur at my side. Then 
he seized his pea-green hat and waved it in the 
air, shouting: "Down with the Bolsheviks!" 

All about us the cry was taken up. 

One saw everywhere in the crowd men pulling 
off their sheepskin coats and tramping them under 
foot with the shout, "Down with Bolshevism!" 
To my surprise I observed that most of the men 
had on blue overalls beneath their Russian 
costumes. In a few moments the crowd seemed 
transformed into a vast mass of mechanics. 



96 The Hohenzollerns in America 

The speaker raised his hand again. "We have 
not yet decided what the new Government will 
be" — 

A great cheer from the people. 

"Nor do we propose to state who will be the 
leaders of it." 

Renewed cheers. 

"But this much we can say. It is to be a free, 
universal, Pan- German Government of love." 

Cheers. 

"Meantime, be warned. Whoever speaks 
against it will be shot: anybody who dares to 
lift a finger will be hanged. A proclamation of 
Brotherhood will be posted all over the city. 
If anybody dares to touch it, or to discuss it, or 
to look at or to be seen reading it, he will be 
hanged to a lamp post." 

Loud applause greeted this part of the speech 
while the faces of the people, to my great aston- 
ishment, seemed filled with genuine rehef and 
beamed with unmistakable enthusiasm. 

"And now," continued the speaker, "I com- 
mand you, you dogs, to disperse quietly and go 
home. Move quickly, smne that you are, or we 
shall open fiie upon you with machine guns." 

With a last outburst of cheering the crowd 
broke and dispersed, like a vast theatre audience. 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 97 

On all sides were expressions of joy and satisfac- 
tion. "Excellent, wunderschon!^^ "He calls us 
dogs! That's splendid. Swine! Did you hear 
him say ^ Swine 7 This is true German Govern- 
ment again at last." 

Then just for a moment the burly figure reap- 
peared on the balcony. 

"A last word!" he called to the departing 
crowd. "I omitted to say that all but one of 
the leaders of the late government are already 
caught. As soon as we can lay our thumb on 
the Chief Executive rest assured that he will be 
hanged." 

"Hurrah!" shouted Boobenstein, waving his 
hat in the air. Then in a whisper to me: "Let us 
go," he said, "while the going is still good." 

We hastened as quickly and unobtrusively as 
we could through the dispersing multitude, turned 
into a side street, and on a sign from the count 
entered a small cabaret or drinking shop, newly 
named, as its sign showed, THE GLORY OF THE 
BRITISH COLONIES CAFE. 

The count with a deep sigh of relief ordered 
wine. 

"You recognized him, of course?" he said. 

' ' Who? ' ' I asked. ' ' You mean the big working- 
man that spoke? Who is he?" 



98 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"So you didn't recognize him?'' said the count. 
"Well, well, but of course all the rest did. Work- 
ingman! It is Field Marshal Hindenburg. It 
means of course that the same old crowd are back 
again. That was Ludendorf standing below. 
I saw it all at once. Perhaps it is the only way. 
Eut as for me I shall not go back : I am too deeply 
compromised: it would be death." 

Boobenstein remained for a time in deep 
thought, his fingers beating a tattoo on the little 
table. Then he spoke. 

"Do you remember," he said, "the old times 
of long ago when you first knew me?" 

"Very well, indeed," I answered. "You were 
one of the German waiters, or rather, one of the 
German officers disguised as waiters at McConkey's 
Restaurant in Toronto." 

"I was," said the count. "I carried the beer 
on a little tray and opened oysters behind a screen. 
It was a wunderschon life. Do you think, my good 
friend, you could get me that job again? " 

"Boobenstein," I exclaimed, "I can get you 
reinstated at once. It will be some small return 
for your kindness to me in Germany." 

"Good," said the count. "Let us sail at once 
for Canada." 

"One thing, however," I said. "You may not 



With the Bolsheviks in Berlin 99 

know that since you left there are no longer beer 
waiters in Toronto because there is no beer. All 
is forbidden." 

^^Let me understand myself,'' said the count 
in as t onishmen t . ^ ^ No beer ! ' ' 

^^None whatever." 

^^ Wine, then?" 

^* Absolutely not. All drinking, except of water, 
is forbidden." 

The coimt rose and stood erect. His figure 
seemed to regain all its old-time Prussian rigidity. 
He extended his hand. 

"My friend," he said. "I bid you farewell." 

"Where are you going to?" I asked. 

"My choice is made," said Von Boobenstein. 
"There are worse things than death. I am about 
to surrender myself to the German authorities." 



///. — Afternoon Tea with the Sultan 



///. — Afternoon Tea with the Sultan 

A Study of Reconstruction in Turkey 



On the very day following the events related 
in the last chapter, I was surprised and delighted 
to receive a telegram which read "Come on to 
Constantinople and write us up too." From the 
signature I saw that the message was from my 
old friend Abdul Aziz the Sultan. 

I had visited him — as of course my readers 
will instantly recollect — during the height of 
the war, and the circumstances of my departure 
had been such that I should have scarcely ven- 
tured to repeat my visit without this express 
invitation. But on receipt of it, I set out at 
once by rail for Constantinople. 

I was delighted to find that under the new 
order of things in going from Berlin to Con- 
stantinople it was no longer necessary to travel 
through the barbarous and brutal populations 
of Germany, Austria and Hungary. The way 
now runs, though I believe the actual railroad is 
the same, through the Thuringian Republic, 

103 



104 The Hohenzollerns in America 

Czecho-Slovakia and Magyaria. It was a source 
of deep satisfaction to see the scowling and 
hostile countenances of Germans, Austrians and 
Hungarians replaced by the cheerful and honest 
faces of the Thuringians, the Czecho-Slovaks and 
the Magyarians. Moreover I was assured on aU 
sides that if these faces are not perfectly satisfac- 
tory, they will be altered in any way required. 

It was very pleasant, too, to find myself once 
again in the flagstoned halls of the Yildiz Kiosk, 
the Sultan's palace. My httle friend Abdul 
Aziz rose at once from his cushioned divan under 
a lemon tree and came shuffling in his big slippers 
to meet me, a smile of welcome on his face. 
He seemed, to my surprise, radiant with happi- 
ness. The disasters attributed by the allied 
press to his unhappy country appeared to sit 
lightly on the httle man. 

"How is everything going in Turkey?" I asked 
as we sat down side by side on the cushions. 

"Splendid," said Abdul. "I suppose you've 
heard that we're bankrupt?" 

"Bankrupt!" I exclaimed. 

"Yes," continued the Sultan, rubbing his 
hands together with positive enjoyment, "we 
can't pay a cent: isn't it great? Have some 
champagne?" 



Afternoon Tea with the Sultan 105 

He clapped his hands together and a turbaned 
attendant appeared with wine on a tray which 
he served into long-necked glasses. 

"I'd rather have tea," I said. 

"No, no, don't take tea," he protested. 
"We've practically cut out afternoon tea here. 
It's part of our Turkish thrift movement. We're 
taking champagne instead. Tell me, have you 
a Thrift Movement like that, where you come 
from — Canada, I think it is, isn't it?" 

"Yes," I answered, "we have one just like that." 

"This war finance is glorious stuff, isn't it?" 
continued the Sultan. "How much do you 
think we owe?" 

"I haven't an idea," I said. 

"Wait a minute," said Abdul. He touched 
a beU and at the sound of it there came shuffling 
into the room my venerable old acquaintance 
Toomuch Koffi, the Royal Secretary. But to 
my surprise he no longer wore his patriarchal 
beard, his flowing robe and his girdle. He was 
clean shaven and close cropped and dressed in 
a short jacket like an American beU boy. 

"You remember Toomuch, I think," said 
Abdul. "I've reconstructed him a Httle, as 
you see." 

"The Peace of Allah be upon thine head," 



106 The Hohenzollerns in America 

said Toomuch Koffi to the Sultan, commencing 
a deep salaam. ^^What wish sits behind thy 
forehead that thou shouldst ring the bell for this 
humble creature of clay to come into the sunlight 
of thy presence? Tell me, O Lord, if per- 
chance — " 

"Here, here,'' interrupted the Sultan impa- 
tiently, "cut all that stuff out, please. That 
ancient courtesy business won't do, not if this 
country is to reconstruct itself and come abreast 
of the great modern democracies. Say to me 
simply 'What's the trouble?'" 

Toomuch bowed, and Abdul continued. "Look 
in your tablets and see how much our pubHc 
debt amounts to in American dollars." 

The secretary drew forth his tablets and bowed 
his head a moment in some perplexity over the 
figures that were scribbled on them. "Multi- 
plication," I heard him murmur, "is an act of 
the grace of heaven; let me invoke a blessing 
on five, the perfect number, whereby the Pound 
Turkish is distributed into the American dollar." 

He remained for a few moments with his eyes 
turned, as if in supplication, towards the vaulted 
ceihng. 

"Have you got it?" asked Abdul. 

"Yes." 



Afternoon Tea with the Sultan 107 

"And what do we owe, adding it all together?" 

"Forty bilhon dollars," said Toomuch. 

"Isn't that wonderful!" exclaimed Abdul, with 
delight radiating over his countenance. "Who 
would have thought that before the war! Forty 
billion dollars! Aren't we the financiers! Aren't 
we the bulwark of monetary power! Can you 
touch that in Canada?" 

"No," I said, "we can't. We don't owe two 
biUion yet." 

"Oh, never mind, never mind," said the Httle 
man in a consoling tone. "You are only a young 
country yet. You'll do better later on. And 
in any case I am sure you are just as proud of 
your one billion as we are of our forty." 

"Oh, yes," I said, "we certainly are." 

"Come, come, that's something anyway. 
You're on the right track, and you must not be 
discouraged if you're not up to the Turkish 
standard yet. You must remember, as I told 
you before, that Turkey leads the world in all 
ideas of government and finance. Take the 
present situation. Here we are, bankrupt — 
pass me the champagne, Toomuch, and sit down 
with us — the very first nation of the lot. It's 
a great feather in the cap of our financiers. It 
gives us a splendid start for the new era of re- 



108 The Hohenzollerns in America 

construction that we are beginning on. As you 
perhaps have heard we are all hugely busy about 
it. You notice by books and papers, do you 
not?" the Sultan added very proudly, waving 
his hand towards a great pile of blue books, 
pamphlets and documents that were heaped 
upon the floor beside him. 

^^Why! I never knew before that you ever 
read anything!" I exclaimed in amazement. 

"Never did. But everything's changed now, 
isn't it, Toomuch? I sit and work here for hours 
every morning. It's become a deUght to me. 
After all," said Abdul, lighting a big cigar and 
sticking up his feet on his pile of papers with an 
air of the deepest comfort, "what is there like 
work? So stimulating, so satisfying. I sit here 
working away, just like this, most of the day. 
There's nothing like it." 

"What are you working at?" I asked. 

"Reconstruction," said the httle man, puffing 
a big cloud from his cigar, "reconstruction." 

"What kind of reconstruction?" 

"All kinds — financial, industrial, pohtical, 
social. I'ts great stuff. By the way," he con- 
tinued with great animation, "would you like 
to be my Minister of Labour? No? Well, 
I'm sorry. I half hoped you would. We're 



Afternoon Tea with the Sultan 109 

having no luck with them. The last one was 
thrown into the Bosphorous on Monday. Here's 
the report on it — no, that's the one on the 
shooting of the Minister of Rehgion — ah! here 
it is — Report on the Drowning of the Minister of 
Labour. Let me read you a bit of this: I call 
this one of the best reports, of its kind, that have 
come in." 

"No, no," I said, "don't bother to read it. 
Just tell me who did it and why." 

" Workingmen," said the Sultan, very cheerfully, 
"a delegation. They withheld their reasons." 

"So you are having labour troubles here too?" 
I asked. 

"Labour troubles!" exclaimed the Httle Sultan 
roUing up his eyes. " I should say so. The whole 
of Turkey is bubbHng with labour unrest like the 
rosewater in a narghile. Look at your tablets, 
Toomuch, and tell me what new strikes there 
have been this morning." 

The aged Secretary fumbled with his notes and 
began to murmur — "Truly will I try with the 
aid of AUah — " 

"Now, now," said Abdul, warningly, "that 
won't do. Say simply ^Sure.' Now tell me." 

The Secretary looked at a little Hst and read: 
"The strikes of to-day comprise — the wig- 



110 The Hohenzollerns in America 

makers, the dog fanciers, the conjurers, the 
snake charmers, and the soothsayers/' 

"You hear that,'' said Abdul proudly. '^That 
represents some of the most skilled labour in 
Turkey." 

"I suppose it does," I said, "but tell me, 
Abdul — what about the reaUy necessary trades, 
the coal miners, the steel workers, the textile 
operatives, the farmers, and the railway people. 
Are they working?" 

The Httle Sultan threw himself back on his 
cushions in a paroxysm of laughter, in which 
even his ancient Secretary was feign to join. 

"My dear sir, my dear sir!" he laughed, "don't 
make me die of laughter. Working! those people 
working! Surely you don't think we are so 
behind hand in Turkey as all that! All those 
workers stopped absolutely months ago. It is 
doubtful if they'll ever work again. There's 
a strong movement in Turkey to abolish all 
necessary work altogether." 

"But who then," I asked, "is working?" 

"Look on the tablets, Toomuch, and see." 

The aged Secretary bowed, turned over the 
leaves of his "tablets," which I now perceived 
on a closer view to be merely an American ten 
cent memorandimi book. Then he read: 



Afternoon Tea with the Sultan 111 

"The following, O all highest, still work — 
the beggars, the poets, the missionaries, the 
Salvation Army, and the instructors of the 
Youths of Light in the American Presbyterian 
CoUege." 

'^But, dear me, Abdul," I exclaimed, "surely 
this situation is desperate? What can your 
nation subsist on in such a situation?'' 

"Pooh, pooh," said the Sultan. "The in- 
terest on our debt alone is two biUion a year. 
Everybody in Turkey, great or small, holds bonds 
to some extent. At the worst they can all live 
fairly well on the interest. This is finance, is it 
not, Toomuch Kofh?" 

"The very best and latest," said the aged man 
with a profound salaam. 

"But what steps are you taking," I asked, 
"to remedy your labour troubles?" 

"We are appointing commissions," said Abdul. 
"We appoint one for each new labour problem. 
How many yesterday, Toomuch?" 

"Forty- three," answered the secretary. 

"That's below our average, is it not?" said 
Abdul a Httle anxiously. "Try to keep it up to 
fifty if you can." 

"And these commissions, what do they do?" 

"They make Reports," said Abdul, beginning 



112 The Hohenzollerns in America 

to yawn as if the continued brain exercise of 
conversation were fatiguing his intellect, "ex- 
cellent reports. We have had some that are 
said to be perfect models of the very best Turkish." 

"And what do they recommend?" 

"I don't know," said the Sultan. "We don't 
read them for that. We like to read them simply 
as Turkish." 

"But what," I urged, "do you do with them? 
What steps do you take?" 

"We send them all," replied the little man, 
puffing at his pipe and growing obviously drowsy 
as he spoke, "to Woodrow Wilson. He can 
deal with them. He is the great conciliator of 
the world. Let him have — how do you say it 
in Enghsh, it is a Turkish phrase — let him have 
his stomach full of conciliation." 

Abdul dozed on his cushions for a moment. 
Then he reopened his eyes. "Is there anything 
else you want to know," he asked, "before I 
retire to the Inner Harem?" 

"Just one thing," I said, "if you don't mind. 
How do you stand internationally? Are you 
coming into the New League of Nations?" 

The Sultan shook his head. 

"No," he said, "we're not coming in. We are 
starting a new league of our own." 



Afternoon Tea with the Sultan 113 

"And who are in it?" 

"Ourselves, and the Armenians — and let me 
see — the Irish, are they not, Toomuch — and 
the Bulgarians — are there any others, Toomuch?" 

"There is talk," said the Secretary "of the 
Yugo-Hebrovians and the Scaroovians — " 

"Who are they?" I asked. 

"We don't know," said Abdul, testily. "They 
wrote to us. They seem all right. Haven't 
you got a lot of people in your league that you 
never heard of?" 

"I see," I said, "and what is the scheme that 
your league is formed on?" 

^ ^ Very simple, ' ' said the Sultan. ^ ^ Each member 
of the league gives its word to all the other mem- 
bers. Then they all take an oath together. Then 
they all sign it. That is absolutely binding." 

He rolled back on his cushions in an evident 
state of boredom and weariness. 

"But surely," I protested, "you don't think 
that a league of that sort can keep the peace?" 

"Peace!" exclaimed Abdul waking into sudden 
astonishment. "Peace! I should think not! Our 
league is for war. Every member gives its word 
that at the first convenient opportunity it will 
knock the stuff out of any of the others that it 



114 The Hohenzollerns in America 

The little Sultan again subsided. Then he 
rose, with some difficulty, from his cushions. 

"Toomuch,'' he said, "take our inquisitive 
friend out into the town; take him to the Bos- 
phorous; take him to the island where the dogs 
are; take him anywhere." He paused to whisper 
a few instructions into the ear of the Secretary. 
"You understand," he said, "weU, take him. 
As for me," — he gave a great yawn as he shuffled 
away, "I am about to withdraw into my Inner 
Harem. Goodbye. I regret that I cannot invite 
you in." 

"So do I," I said. "Goodbye." 



IV. — Echoes of the War 



1. — The Boy Who Came Back 



THE war is over. The soldiers are coming 
home. On all sides we are assured that 
the problem of the returned soldier is 
the gravest of our national concerns. 

So I may say it without fear of contradiction, 
— since everybody else has seen it, — that, up to 
the present time, the returned soldier is a disap- 
pointment. He is not turning out as he ought. 
According to all the professors of psychology he 
was to come back bloodthirsty and brutalised, 
soaked in militarism and talking only of slaughter. 
In fact, a widespread movement had sprung up, 
warmly supported by the business men of the 
cities, to put him on the land. It was thought 
that central Nevada or northern Idaho would 
do nicely for him. At the same time an agitation 
had been started among the farmers, with the 
slogan "Back to the city," the idea being that 
farm life was so rough that it was not fair to ask 
the returned soldier to share it. 

All these anticipations turn out to be quite 
groundless. 

117 



118 The Hohenzollerns in America 



The first returned soldier of whom I had direct 
knowledge was my nephew Tom. When he came 
back, after two years in the trenches, we asked 
him to dine with us. "Now, remember," I said 
to my wife, "Tom will be a very different being 
from what he was when he went away. He left 
us as Httle more than a school boy, only in his 
first year at college; in fact, a mere child. You 
remember how he used to bore us with baseball 
talk and that sort of thing. And how shy he 
was! You recall his awful fear of Professor 
Razzler, who used to teach him mathematics. 
All that, of course, will be changed now. Tom 
will have come back a man. We must ask the 
old professor to meet him. It will amuse Tom to 
see him again. Just think of the things he must 
have seen! But we must be a httle careful at 
dinner not to let him horrify the other people 
with brutal details of the war." 

Tom came. I had expected him to arrive in 
uniform with his pocket full of bombs. Instead 
of this he wore ordinary evening dress with a 
dinner jacket. I realised as I helped him to 
take off his overcoat in the hall that he was very 
proud of his dinner jacket. He had never had 
one before. He said he wished the "boys" could 
see hun in it. I asked him why he had put off 



Echoes of the War 119 

his lieutenant's uniform so quickly. He ex- 
plained that he was entitled not to wear it as 
soon as he had his discharge papers signed; some 
of the fellows, he said, kicked them off as soon as 
they left the ship, but the rule was, he told me, 
that you had to wear the thing till your papers 
were signed. 

Then his eye caught a glimpse sideways of 
Professor Razzler standing on the hearth rug in 
the drawing room. "Say,'' he said, "is that 
the professor?" I could see that Tom was 
scared. All the signs of physical fear were written 
on his face. When I tried to lead him into the 
drawing room I realised that he was as shy as 
ever. Three of the women began talking to him 
all at once. Tom answered, yes or no, — with 
his eyes down. I liked the way he stood, though, 
so unconsciously erect and steady. The other 
men who came in afterwards, with easy greetings 
and noisy talk, somehow seemed loud-voiced and 
seK-assertive. 

Tom, to my surprise, refused a cocktail. It 
seems, as he explained, that he "got into the way 
of taking nothing over there." I noticed that 
my friend Quiller, who is a war correspondent, 
or, I should say, a war editorial writer, took three 
cocktails and talked aU the more brilliantly for it 



120 The Hohenzollerns in America 

through the opening courses of the dinner, about 
the story of the smashing of the Hindenburg hne. 
He decided, after his second Burgundy, that it 
had been simply a case of sticking it out. I say 
" Burgundy '^ because we had substituted Bur- 
gundy, the sparkUng kind, for champagne at our 
dinners as one of our Httle war economies. 

Tom had nothing to say about the Hindenburg 
Hne. In fact, for the first half of the dinner he 
hardly spoke. I think he was worried about his 
left hand. There is a deep furrow across the 
back of it where a piece of shrapnel went through 
and there are two fingers that will hardly move 
at all. I could see that he was ashamed of its 
clumsiness and afraid that someone might notice 
it. So he kept silent. Professor Razzler did 
indeed ask him straight across the table what he 
thought about the final breaking of the Hinden- 
burg line. But he asked it with that same fierce 
look from under his bushy eyebrows with which 
he used to ask Tom to define the path of a 
tangent, and Tom was rattled at once. He 
answered something about being afraid that he 
was not well posted, owing to there being so 
little chance over there to read the papers. 

After that Professor Razzler and Mr. Quiller 
discussed for us, most energetically, the strategy 



Echoes of the War 121 

of the Lorraine sector (Tom served there six 
months, but he never said so) and high explosives 
and the possibiHties of aerial bombs. (Tom was 
"buried" by an aerial bomb but, of course, he 
didn't break in and mention it.) 

But we did get him talking of the war at last, 
towards the end of the dinner; or rather, the girl 
sitting next to him did, and presently the rest of 
us found ourselves listening. The strange thing 
was that the girl was a mere slip of a thing, 
hardly as old as Tom himself. In fact, my wife 
was almost afraid she might be too young to ask 
to dinner: girls of that age, my wife tells me, 
have hardly sense enough to talk to men, and fail 
to interest them. This is a proposition which I 
think it better not to dispute. 

But at any rate we presently realized that Tom 
was talking about his war experiences and the 
other talk about the table was gradually hushed 
into listening. 

This, as nearly as I can set it down, is what he 
told us: That the French fellows picked up base- 
ball in a way that is absolutely amazing; they 
were not much good, it seems, at the bat, at any 
rate not at first, but at running bases they were 
perfect marvels; some of the French made good 
pitchers, too; Tom knew a poilu who had lost 



122 The Hohenzollerns in America 

his right arm who could pitch as good a ball with 
his left as any man on the American side; at the 
port where Tom first landed and where they 
trained for a month they had a dandy ball ground, 
a regular peach, a former parade ground of the 
French barracks. On being asked which port it 
was, Tom said he couldn't remember; he thought 
it was either Boulogne or Bordeaux or Brest, — 
at any rate, it was one of those places on the 
EngHsh channel. The ball ground they had 
behind the trenches was not so good; it was too 
much cut up by long range shells. But the ball 
ground at the base hospital (where Tom was sent 
for his second wound) was an Ai ground. The 
French doctors, it appears, were perfectly rotten 
at baseball, not a bit like the soldiers. Tom 
wonders that they kept them. Tom says that 
baseball had been tried among the German 
prisoners, but they are perfect dubs. He doubts 
whether the Germans will ever be able to play 
ball. They lack the national spirit. On the 
other hand, Tom thinks that the EngHsh will 
play a great game when they really get into it. 
He had two weeks' leave in London and went to 
see the game that King George was at, and says 
that the King, if they will let him, will make the 
greatest rooter of the whole bimch. 



Echoes of the War 123 

Such was Tom's war talk. 

It grieved me to note that as the men sat 
smoking their cigars and drinking Uqueur whiskey 
(we have cut out port at our house till the final 
peace is signed) Tom seemed to have subsided 
into being only a boy again, a first-year college 
boy among his seniors. They spoke to him in 
quite a patronising way, and even asked him 
two or three direct questions about fighting in 
the trenches, and wounds and the dead men in 
No Man's Land and the other horrors that the 
civihan mind hankers to hear about. Perhaps 
they thought, from the boy's talk, that he had 
seen nothing. If so, they were mistaken. For 
about three minutes, not more, Tom gave them 
what was coming to them. He told them, for ex- 
ample, why he trained his "feUows" to drive the 
bayonet through the stomach and not through 
the head, that the bayonet driven through the 
face or skull sticks and, — but there is no need 
to recite it here. Any of the boys hke Tom can 
tell it all to you, only they don't want to and 
don't care to. 

They've got past it. 

But I noticed that as the boy talked, — quietly 
and reluctantly enough, — the older men fell 
silent and looked into his face with the reahsation 



124 The Hohenzollerns in America 

that behind his simple talk and quiet manner lay 
an inward vision of grim and awful realities that 
no words could picture. 

I think that they were glad when we joined the 
ladies again and when Tom talked of the amateur 
vaudeville show that his company had got up 
behind the trenches. 

Later on, when the other guests were telephon- 
ing for their motors and calling up taxis, Tom 
said he'd walk to his hotel; it was only a mile 
and the light rain that was falling would do him, 
he said, no harm at all. So he trudged oE, 
refusing a hft. 

Oh, no, I don't think we need to worry about 
the returned soldier. Only let him return, that's 
all. When he does, he's a better man than we 
are, Gunga Dinn. 



2. — The War Sacrifices of Mr. Spugg 



ALTHOUGH we had been members of the 
same club for years, I only knew Mr. 
" Spugg by sight until one afternoon when 
I heard him saying that he intended to send 
his chauffeur to the war. 

It was said quite quietly, — no bombast or 
boasting about it. Mr. Spugg was standing 
among a little group of listening members of 
the club and when he said that he had decided 
to send his chauffeur, he spoke with a kind of 
simple earnestness, a determination that marks 
the character of the man. 

"Yes," he said, "we need all the man power 
we can cormnand. This thing has come to a 
showdown and weVe got to recognise it. I 
told Henry that it's a showdown and that he's 
to get ready and start right away." 

"Well, Spugg," said one of the members, 
"you're certainly setting us a fine example." 

"What else can a man do?" said Mr. Spugg. 

"When does your chauffeur leave?" asked 
another man. 

125 



126 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"Right away. I want him in the firing line 
just as quick as I can get him there." 

"It's a fine thing you're doing, Spugg/' said 
a third member, "but do you reahse that your 
chauffeur may be killed?" 

"I must take my chance on that," answered 
Mr. Spugg, firmly. "I've thought this thing out 
and made up my mind: If my chauffeur is killed, 
I mean to pay for him, — full and adequate 
compensation. The loss must fall on me, not on 
him. Or, say Henry comes back mutilated, — 
say he loses a leg, — say he loses two legs, — " 

Here Mr. Spugg looked about him at his 
listeners, with a look that meant that even three 
legs wouldn't be too much for him. 

"Whatever Henry loses I pay for. The loss 
shaU fall on me, every cent of it." 

"Spugg," said a quiet looking, neatly dressed 
man whom I knew to be the president of an 
insurance company and who reached out and 
shook the speaker by the hand, "this is a fine 
thing you're doing, a big thing. But we mustn't 
let you do it alone. Let our company take a 
hand in it. We're making a special rate now 
on chauffeurs, footmen, and house-servants sent 
to the war, quite below the rate that actuarial 
figxires justify. It is our little war contribu- 



Echoes of the War 127 

tion," he added modestly. "We like to feel 
that we're doing our bit, too. We had a chauffeur 
killed last week. We paid for him right off 
without demur, — waived all question of who 
killed him. I never signed a check (as I took 
occasion to say in a little note I wrote to his 
people) with greater pleasure.'' 

''What do you do if Henry's mutilated?" asked 
Mr. Spugg, turning his quiet eyes on the insur- 
ance man and facing the brutal facts of things 
without flinching. "What do you pay? Sup- 
pose I lose the use of Henry's legs, what then?" 

"It's all right," said his friend. "Leave it 
to us. Whatever he loses, we make it good." 

" All right," said Spugg, " send me round a policy. 
I'm going to see Henry clear through on this." 

It was at this point that at my own urgent 
request I was introduced to Mr. Spugg, so that I 
might add my congratulations to those of the 
others. I told him that I felt, as all the other 
members of the club did, that he was doing a 
big thing, and he answered again, in his modest 
way, that he didn't see what else a man could do. 

"My son Alfred and I," he said, "talked it 
over last night and we agreed that we can run 
the car ourselves, or make a shot at it anyway. 
After all, it's war time." 



128 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"What branch of the service are you putting 
your chauffeur in?'' I asked. 

"I'm not sure," he answered. "I think I'll 
send him up in the air. It's dangerous, of course, 
but it's no time to think about that." 

So, in due time, Mr. Spugg's chauffeur, Henry, 
went overseas. He was reported first as in 
England. Next he was right at the front, at the 
very firing itself. We knew then, — everybody 
in the club knew that Mr. Spugg's chauffeur 
might be kUled at any moment. But great as 
the strain must have been, Spugg went up and 
down to his office and in and out of the club 
without a tremor. The situation gave him a 
new importance in our eyes, something tense. 

"This seems to be a terrific busiaess," I said 
to him one day at lunch, "this new German 
drive." 

"My chauffeur," said Mr. Spugg, "was right 
in the middle of it." 

"He was, eh?" 

"Yes," he continued, "one shell burst in the 
air so near him it almost broke his wings." 

Mr. Spugg told this with no false boasting or 
bravado, eating his celery as he spoke of it. 
Here was a man who had nearly had his chauf- 
feur's wings blown off and yet he never moved 



Echoes of the War 129 

a muscle. I began to realize the kind of resolute 
stuff that the man was made of. 

A few days later bad news came to the club. 

"Have you heard the bad news about Spugg?" 
someone asked. 

"No, what?'' 

"His chauffeur's been gassed." 

"How is he taking it?" 

"Fine. He's sending off his gardener to take 
the chauffeur's place." 

So that was Mr. Spugg's answer to the Ger- 
mans. 

We lunched together that day. 

"Yes," he said, "Henry's gassed. How it 
happened I don't know. He must have come 
down out of the air. I told him I wanted him 
in the air. But let it pass. It's done now." 

"And you're sending your gardener?" 

"I am," said Spugg. "He's gone already. 
I called him in from the garden yesterday. I 
said, ^WiUiam, Henry's been gassed. Our first 
duty is to keep up our man power at the front. 
You must leave to-night.'" 

"What are you putting William into?" I asked. 

"Infantry. He'll do best in the trenches, — 
digs weU and is a very fair shot. Anyway I 
want him to see all the fighting that's going. 



130 The Hohenzollerns in America 

If the Germans want give and take in this business 
they can have it. They'll soon see who can 
stand it best. I told WiUiam when he left. I 
said, * WiUiam, we've got to show these fellows 
that man for man we're a match for them.' 
That's the way I look at it, man for man." 

I watched Mr. Spugg's massive face as he 
went on with his meal. Not a nerve of it moved. 
If he felt any fear, at least he showed no trace 
of it. 

After that I got war news from him at intervals, 
in Httle scraps, as I happened to meet him. "The 
war looks bad," I said to him one day as I chanced 
upon him getting into his motor. "This sub- 
marine business is pretty serious." 

"It is," he said, "WiUiam was torpedoed 
yesterday." 

Then he got into his car and drove away, as 
quietly as if nothing had happened. 

A Uttle later that day I heard him talking about 
it in the club. "Yes," he was saying, "a sub- 
marine. It torpedoed WiUiam, — my gardener. 
I have both a chauffeur and a gardener at the 
war. WiUiam was picked up on a raft. He's in 
pretty bad shape. My son AUred had a cable 
from him that he's coming home. We've both 
telegraphed him to stick it out." 



Echoes of the War 131 

The news was the chief topic in the club that 
day. "Spugg's gardener has been torpedoed," 
they said, '^but Spugg refuses to have him quit 
and come home." "Well done, Spugg," said 
everybody. 

After that we had news from time to time 
about both WiUiam and Henry. 

"Henry's out of the hospital," said Spugg. 
"I hope to have him back in France in a few 
days. William's in bad shape still. I had a 
London surgeon go and look at him. I told him 
not to mind the expense but to get William fixed 
up right away. It seems that one arm is more 
or less paralysed. I've wired back to him not to 
hesitate. They say William's blood is still too 
thin for the operation. I've cabled to them to 
take some of Henry's. I hate to do it, but this 
is no time to stick at anything." 

A little later William and Henry were reported 
both back in France. This was at the very 
moment of the great offensive. But Spugg went 
about his daily business unmoved. Then came 
the worst news of all. "William and Henry," 
he said to me, "are both missing. I don't know 
where the devil they are." 

"Missing!" I repeated. 

"Both of them. The Germans have caught 



132 The Hohenzollerns in America 

them both. I suppose I shan't have either of 
them back now till the war is all over." 

He gave a shght sigh, — the only sign of com- 
plaint that ever I had heard come from him. 

But the next day we learned what was Spugg's 
answer to the German's capture of WiUiam and 
Henry. 

"Have you heard what Spugg is doing?'' the 
members of the club asked one another. 

"What?" 

"He's sending over Meadows, his own man!^^ 

There was no need to comment on it. The 
cool courage of the thing spoke for itself. Mead- 
ows, — Spugg's own man, — his house valet, 
without whom he never travelled twenty miles! 

"What else was there to do?" said Mr. Spugg 
when I asked him if it was true that Meadows was 
going. "I take no credit for sending Meadows, 
nor, for the matter of that, for anything that 
Meadows may do over there. It was a simple 
matter of duty. My son and I had him into the 
dining room last night after dinner. 'Meadows,' 
we said, 'Henry and William are caught. Our 
man power at the front has got to be kept up. 
There's no one left but ourselves and you. There's 
no way out of it. You'll have to go.'" 

"But how," I protested, "can you get along 



Echoes of the War 133 

with Meadows, your valet, gone? You'll be 
lost!" 

"We must do the best we can. We've talked 
it all over. My son will help me dress and I will 
help him. We can manage, no doubt." 

So Meadows went. 

After this Mr. Spugg, dressed as best he could 
manage it, and taking turns with his son in 
driving his own motor, was a pathetic but uncom- 
plaining object. 

Meadows meantime was reported as with the 
heavy artillery, doing well. "I hope nothing 
happens to Meadows," Spugg kept saying. "If 
it does, we're stuck. We can't go ourselves. 
We're too busy. We've talked it over and we've 
both decided that it's impossible to get away from 
the office, — not with business as brisk as it is 
now. We're busier than we've been in ten years 
and can't get off for a day. We may try to take 
a month off for the Adirondacks a little later but 
as for Europe, it's out of the question." 

Meantime, one little bit of consolation came to 
help Mr. Spugg to bear the burden of the war. 
I found him in the lounge room of the club one 
afternoon among a group of men, exhibiting two 
medals that were being passed from hand to hand. 

"Sent to me by the French government," he 



134 The Hohenzollerns in America 

explained proudly. "They^re for William and 
Henry. The motto means, 'For Conspicuous 
Courage'" (Mr. Spugg drew himself up with 
legitimate pride). ''I shall keep one and let 
Alfred keep the other till they come back.'* Then 
he added, as an afterthought, "They may never 
come back." 

From that day on, Mr. Spugg, with his French 
medal on his watch chain, was the most con- 
spicuous figure in the club. He was pointed out 
as having done more than any other one man in 
the institution to keep the flag flying. But 
presently the Hmit of Mr. Spugg's efforts and 
sacrifices was reached. Even patriotism such as 
his must have some bounds. 

On entering the club one afternoon I could 
hear his voice bawHng vociferously in one of the 
telephone cabinets in the hall. "Hello, Washing- 
ton," he was shouting. "Is that Washington? 
Long Distance, I want Washington." 

Fifteen minutes later he came up to the sitting 
room, still flushed with indignation and excitement. 

"That's the Hmit," he said, "the absolute 
limit!" 

"What's the matter?" I asked. 

"They drafted my son Alfred," he answered. 
' 'Just imagine it ! When we're so busy in the office 



Echoes of the War 135 

that we're getting down there at half past eight 
in the morning! Drafted Alfred! ^ Great Caesar/ 
I said to them! ^Look here! You've had my 
chauffeur and he's gassed, and you've had my 
gardener and he's torpedoed and they're both 
prisoners, and last month I sent you my own 
man! That,' I said, 4s about the hmit.'" 

"What did they say," I asked. 

"Oh, it's all right. They've fixed it all up 
and they've apologized as well. Alfred won't 
go, of course, but it makes one realise that you 
can carry a thing too far. Why, they'd be taking 
me next!" 

"Oh, surely not!" I said. 



3. — // Germany Had Won 



SOMETIMES, in the past, we have grown 
a Httle impatient with our North American 
civiHsation, with its strident clamour, its 
noisy elections, its extremes of hberty, its occa- 
sional corruption and the faults that we now see 
were the necessary accompaniments of its merits. 
But let us set beside it a picture such as this, 
taken from the New York Imperial Gazette of 
1925 — or from any paper of the same period, 
such as would have been published if Germany 
had won. 

General Boob of Boobenstiff, Imperial Governor 
of New York, will attend divine (Imperial) service 
on Sunday morning next at the church of St. 
John the (Imperial) Divine. The subway cars will 
be stopped while the General is praying. All sub- 
way passengers are enjoined {hefohlen), during the 
thus-to-be-ordered period of cessation, to remain 
in a reverential attitude. Those in the seats will 
keep the head bowed. Those holding to the straps 
will elevate one leg, keeping the knee in the air. 

136 



Echoes of the War 137 

On Monday evening General Boob von Booben- 
stiff, Imperial Governor of New York, will be 
graciously pleased to attend a performance at the 
(Imperial) Winter Garden on Upper (Imperial) 
Broadway. It is ordered that on the entrance of 
His Excellency the audience will spontaneously 
rise and break into three successive enthusiastic 
cheers. Mr. Al Jolson wiU remain kneeling on 
the stage till the Gubernatorial AU Highest has 
seated itself. Mr. Jolson will then, by special 
(Imperial) permission, be allowed to make four 
jokes in German to be taken from a list supplied 
by the Imperial Censor of Humour. The Gover- 
nor, accompanied by his mihtary staff, will then 
leave, and the performance wiU close. 



It is ordered that, on Tuesday afternoon, as a 
sign of thankfulness for the blessings of the 
German peace, the business men of New York 
shall walk in procession from the Battery to the 
Bronx. They will then be inspected by Governor 
Boobenstiff. If the Governor is delayed in 
arriving at the hereafter-to-be-indicated point of 
general put-yourself- there, the procession will 
walk back to the Battery and back again, con- 
tinuing so, pro and con, till the arrival of the 
Governor. 



138 The Hohenzollerns in America 

The approaching visit of His Royal and Im- 
perial Solemnity the Prince Apparent of Bavaria 
shall be heralded in the (Imperial) City of New 
York with general rejoicing. The city shall be 
spontaneously decorated with flags. Smiles of 
cordial welcome shall appear on every face. 
Animated crowds of eager citizens shall move to 
and fro and shouts of welcome shall, by order of 
the Chief of PoHce, break from the Hps. 

Among those who are expected to be in the 
Imperial city to welcome his Royal Solemnity 
will be the Hereditary Grand Duke of Schlitz- 
in-Mein (formerly Milwaukee), the Prince Mar- 
grave of Wisconsin and the Hereditary Chief 
Constable of Nevada. 



We are dehghted to be able to chronicle that 
on the morning of the 14th there was bom at the 
Imperial Residence of His SimpHcity the Heredi- 
tary Governor of the Provinz (formerly State) 
of New York, in the (Imperial) city of Albany a 
tenth son to the illustrious Prince and Princess 
who rule over us with such fatherly care. The 
boy was christened yesterday at the (Imperial) 
Lutheran Church and is to bear the name Fred- 
erick Wilhelm AmeHa Mary Johan Heinrich 
Ruprecht. The whole city of Albany is thrown 



Echoes of the War 139 

into the wildest rejoicing. The legislature has 
voted an addition of $400,000 per annum to the 
civil Hst for the maintenance of the young prince. 
Joy suffuses every home. This being the tenth 
son born to their Highnesses in ten years it is felt 
that the future of the dynasty is more or less 
secured. Even the humblest home is filled with 
the reflected joy that streams out from the 
Residency. Their Royal Highnesses appeared 
yesterday on the balcony amid the wild huzzoos 
of the people transported with joy. His Sim- 
plicity the Prince wore the full dress uniform of 
an Imperial Jaeger of the Adirondacks, and Her 
Royal Highness was attired as a Colonel of 
Artillery. It is impossible to express the jubila- 
tion of the moment. 



We regret to report that owing to the jostHng 
(possibly accidental, but none the less actual) 
of an Imperial officer — Field-Lieutenant Schmidt 
— at the entrance to Brooklyn Bridge, the bridge 
is declared closed to the public until further 
notice. We are proud to state the Field Lieu- 
tenant at once cut down his cowardly assailant 
with his saber. It has pleased His Unspeakable 
Loftiness, the German Emperor, to cable his con- 
gratulations to the Lieutenant, who will receive 



140 The Hohenzollerns in America 

The Order of the Dead Dog for the noble way 
in which he has maintained the traditions of his 
uniform. 

A striking feature of the now-taking-place Art 
Exhibition at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute 
(formerly MetropoHtan Gallery) in the Thier- 
garten (formerly Central Park) is offered by the 
absolutely marvellous paintings exhibited by the 
Princess Marie Paul CeciUe HohenzoUern-Stick- 
itintothem, a cousin of Our Noble Governor. 
The paintings which the Princess has been pre- 
ciously pleased to paint and has even stooped to 
exhibit to the filled-with-wonder eye, of the pubhc 
have been immediately awarded the first prize in 
each class. While it would be invidious even to 
suggest that any one of Her High Incipiency's 
pictures is better than any other, our feehng is 
that especially the picture Night on the Ei4dson 
River is of so rare a quality both of technique and 
of inspiration that it supersedes the bounds of 
the hitherto-thought- to-be-possible art in America. 
The Princess's conception of night, black as a 
pall and yet luminous as a polished stove pipe, 
is only equalled by her feehng towards the Hudson, 
which hes extended in soporific superficiality 
beneath the sable covering of darkness in which 



Echoes of the War 141 

Her Highness has been pleased to overwhelm it. 
Throughout the day an eager-to-see crowd of 
spectators were beaten back from the picture by 
the poHce with clubs. 



We are permitted officially to confirm the al- 
ready gladly - from - mouth - to - mouth - whispered 
news of an approaching marriage between Prince 
Heinrich of Texas and the Princess AmeHa Vic- 
toria Louisa, Hereditary Heir Consumptive of the 
Imperial Provinz of Maine. The marriage, so it 
is whispered, although performed in accordance 
with the wishes of the Emperor as expressed by 
cable, is in every way a love match. What lends 
a touch of romance to the betrothal of the Royal 
YoungHngs is that the Prince had never even 
seen the Princess Amelia until the day when the 
legislature of the Provinz of Maine voted her a 
marriage portion of half a million dollars. Imme- 
diately on this news a secret visit was arranged, 
the Prince journeying to Bangor incognito as 
the Count of Flim-Flam in the costume of an 
officer of the Imperial Scavengers. On receipt 
of the Emperor's telegram the happy pair fell 
in love with one another at once. What makes 
the approaching union particularly auspicious for 



142 The Hohenzollerns in America 

the whole country is that it brings with it the 
union of Maine and Texas, henceforth to form 
a single grateful provinz. The Royal Pair, it 
is understood, will live alternately in each prov- 
ince a month at a time and the legislature, the 
executive officials, the courts of law and the tax 
collectors will follow them to and fro. 

We cannot but contrast this happy issue with 
the turbulence and disorder in which our country 
lived before the Great War of Liberation. 



We are dehghted to learn from our despatches 
from Boston that the Hohenzollem Institute 
(formerly Harvard University) is to be opened 
next autumn. By express permission of the 
Imperial Government, classes in Enghsh wiU be 
permitted for half an hour each day. 

By the clemency of the Emperor the sentences 
of W. H. Taft, and W. Wilson have been com- 
muted from the sentence of fifty years imprison- 
ment to imprisonment for life. We hope, in a 
special supplement, to be able to add the full list 
of sentences, executions, imprisonments, fines, and 
attainders that have been promulgated in honour 
of the birthday of our Imperial Sovereign. 



4. — War and Peace at the Galaxy Club 



nr 



HE Great Peace Kermesse at the Galaxy 
Club, to which I have the honour to be- 

-■- long, held with a view to wipe out the 
Peace Deficit of the Club, has just ended. For 
three weeks our club house has been a blaze 
of illumination. We have had four orchestras 
in attendance. There have been suppers and 
dances every night. Our members have not 
spared themselves. 

The Kermesse is now over. We have time, as 
our lady members are saying, to turn round. 

For the moment we are sitting listening, amid 
bursts of applause, to our treasurer's statement. 
As we hear it we realise that this Peace Kermesse 
has proved the culmination and crown of four 
winters' war work. 

But I must explain from the beginning. 

Our efforts began with the very opening of the 
war. We felt that a rich organisation like ours 
ought to do something for the relief of the Bel- 
gians. At the same time we felt that our mem- 
bers would rather receive something in the way of 

143 



144 The Hohenzollerns in America 

entertainment for their money than give it straight 
out of their pockets. 

We therefore decided first to hold a pubHc 
lecture in the club, and engaged the services of 
Professor Dry to lecture on the causes of the war. 

In view of the circumstances, Professor Dry 
very kindly reduced his lecture fee, which (he 
assured us) is generally two hundred and fifty 
dollars, to two hundred and forty. 

The lecture was most interesting. Professor 
Dry traced the causes of the War backwards 
through the Middle Ages. He showed that it 
represented the conflict of the brachiocephalic 
culture of the Wendic races with the dohcho- 
cephalic culture of the Alpine stock. At the time 
when the lights went out he had got it back to the 
eighth century before Christ. 

Unfortunately the night, being extremely wet, 
was unfavourable. Few of our members care 
to turn out to lectures in wet weather. The 
treasurer was compelled to announce to the Com- 
mittee a net deficit of two hundred dollars. 
Some of the ladies of the Committee moved that 
the entire deficit be sent to the Belgians, but were 
overruled by the interference of the men. 

But the error was seen to have been in the 
choice of the lecturer. Our members were no 



Echoes of the War 145 

longer interested in the causes of the war. The 
topic was too old. We therefore held another 
pubUc lecture in the club, on the topic What 
Will Come After the War. It was given by a 
very talented gentleman, a Mr. Guess, a most 
interesting speaker, who reduced his fee (as the 
thing was a war charity) by one-half, leaving it 
at three hundred dollars. Unhappily the weather 
was against us. It was too fine. Our members 
scarcely care to hsten to lectures in fine weather. 
And it turned out that our members are not 
interested in what will come after the war. The 
topic is too new. Our receipts of fifty dollars 
left us with a net deficit of two hundred and 
fifty. Our treasurer therefore proposed that we 
should carry both deficits forward and open a 
Special Patriotic Entertainment Account showing 
a net total deficit of four hundred and fifty 
dollars. 

In the opinion of the committee our mistake 
had been in engaging outside talent. It was felt 
that the cost of this was prohibitive. It was 
better to invite the services of the members 
of the club themselves. A great number of the 
ladies expressed their wilHngness to take part in 
any kind of war work that took the form of 
pubHc entertainment. 



146 The Hohenzollerns in America 

Accordingly we presented a play. It was 
given in the ball room of the club house, a stage 
being specially put up for us by a firm of con- 
tractors. The firm (as a matter of patriotism) 
did the whole thing for us at cost, merely charg- 
ing us with the labour, the material, the time, 
the thought and the anxiety that they gave to 
the job, but for nothing else. In fact, the whole 
staging, including fights, plumbing and decora- 
tions was merely a matter of five hundred dollars. 
The plumbers very considerately made no charge 
for their time, but only for their work. 

It was felt that it would be better to have a 
new play than an old. We selected a briUiant 
little modem drawing-room comedy never yet 
presented. The owner of the copyright, a the- 
atrical firm, let us use it for a merely nominal 
fee of two hundred doUars, including the sole 
right to play the piece forever. There being 
only twenty-eight characters in it, it was felt 
to be more suitable than a more ambitious thing. 
The tickets were placed at one dollar, no one 
being admitted free except the performers them- 
selves, and the members who very kindly acted 
as scene shifters, curtain fifters, ushers, door- 
keepers, programme sellers, and the general 
committee of management. All the performers, 



Echoes of the War 147 

at their own suggestion, supplied their own cos- 
tumes, charging nothing to the club except the 
material and the cost of dressmaking. Beyond this 
there was no expense except for the fee, very rea- 
sonable, of Mr. Skip, the professional coach who 
trained the performers, and who asked us, in 
view of the circumstances, less than half of what 
he would have been willing to accept. 

The proceeds were to be divided between the 
Belgian Fund and the Red Cross, giving fifty 
per cent to each. A motion in amendment frora 
the ladies' financial committee to give fifty per 
cent to the Belgian Fund and sixty per cent to the 
Red Cross was voted down. 

Unfortunately it turned out that the idea of 
a play was a mistake in judgment. Our members, 
it seemed, did not care to go to see a play except 
in a theatre. A great number of them, however, 
very kindly turned out to help in shifting the 
scenery and in acting as ushers. 

Our treasurer announced, as the result of the 
play, a net deficit of twelve hundred dollars. He 
moved, with general applause, that it be carried 
forward. 

The total deficit having now reached over 
sixteen hundred dollars, there was a general 
feeling that a very special effort must be made to 



148 The Hohenzollems in America 

remove it. It was decided to hold Weekly 
Patriotic Dances in the club ball room, every 
Saturday evening. No charge was made for 
admission to the dances, but a War Supper was 
served at one dollar a head. 

Unfortunately the dances, as first planned, 
proved again an error. It appeared that though 
our members are passionately fond of dancing, 
few if any of them cared to eat at night. The 
plan was therefore changed. The supper was 
served first, and was free, and for the dancing 
after supper a charge was made of one dollar, 
per person. This again was an error. It seems 
that after our members have had supper they 
prefer to go home and sleep. After one winter 
of dancing the treasurer announced a total 
Patriotic Relief Deficit of five thousand dollars, 
to be carried forward to next year. This sum 
duly appeared in the annual balance sheet of the 
club. The members, especially the ladies, were 
glad to think that we were at least doing something 
for the war. 

At this point some of our larger men, them- 
selves financial experts, took hold. They said 
that our entertainments had been on too small 
a scale. They told us that we had been "un- 
dermined by overhead expenses." The word 



Echoes of the War 149 

"overhead" was soon on everybody's lips. We 
were told that if we could "distribute our over- 
head" it would disappear. It was therefore 
planned to hold a great War Kermesse with a 
view to spreading out the overhead so thin that 
it would vanish. 

But it was at this very moment that the Ar- 
mistice burst upon us in a perfectly unexpected 
fashion. Everyone of our members was, un- 
doubtedly, delighted that the war was over but 
there was a very general feeling that it would 
have been better if we could have had a rather 
longer notice of what was coming. It seemed, 
as many of our members said, such a leap in the 
dark to rush into peace all at once. It was said 
indeed by our best business men that in financial 
circles they had been fuUy aware that there was 
a danger of peace for some time and had taken 
steps to discount the peace risk. 

But for the club itself the thing came with a 
perfect crash. The whole preparation of the 
great Kermesse was well under way when the 
news broke upon us. For a time the members 
were aghast. It looked hke ruin. But presently 
it was suggested that it might still be possible 
to save the club by turning the whole affair into 
a Peace Kermesse and devoting the proceeds 



150 The Hohenzollerns in America 

to some suitable form of relief. Luckily it was 
discovered that there was still a lot of starvation 
in Russia, and fortimately it turned out that in 
spite of the armistice the Turks were still killing 
the Armenians. 

So it was decided to hold the Kermesse and 
give all the profits reahsed by it to the Victims 
of the Peace. Everybody set to work again with 
a will. The Kermesse indeed had to be postponed 
for a few months to make room for the changes 
needed, but it has now been held and, in a certain 
sense, it has been the wildest kind of success. 
The club, as I said, has been a blaze of Hght for 
three weeks. We have had four orchestras in 
attendance every evening. There have been 
booths draped with the flags of all the Allies, 
except some that we were not sure about, in every 
corridor of the club. There have been dinner 
parties and dances every evening. The members, 
especially the ladies, have not spared themselves. 
Many of them have spent practically all their 
time at the Kermesse, not getting home until 
two in the morning. 

And yet somehow one has felt that underneath 
the surface it was not a success. The spirit 
seemed gone out of it. The members themselves 
confessed in confidence that in spite of all they 



Echoes of the War 151 

could do their hearts were not in it. Peace had 
somehow taken away all the old glad sense of 
enjoyment. As to spending money at the Ker- 
messe all the members admitted frankly that they 
had no heart for it. This was especially the case 
when the rumour got abroad that the Armenians 
were a poor lot and that some of the Turks were 
quite gentlemanly fellows. It was said, too, 
that if the Russians did starve it would do them 
a lot of good. 

So it was known even before we went to hear 
the financial report that there would be no ques- 
tion of profits on the Kermesse going to the 
Armenians or the Russians. 

And to-night the treasurer has been reading 
out to a general meeting the financial results as 
nearly as they can be computed. 

He has put the Net Patriotic Deficit, as nearly 
as he can estimate it, at fifteen thousand doUars, 
though he has stated, with applause from the 
ladies, that the Gross Deficit is bigger still. 

The Ladies Financial Committee has just 
carried a motion that the whole of the deficit, 
both net and gross, be now forwarded to the Red 
Cross Society (sixty per cent), the Belgian ReHef 
Fund (fifty per cent), and the remainder invested 
in the War Loan. 



152 The Hohenzollerns in America 

But there is a very general feeling among the 
male members that the club will have to go into 
liquidation. Peace has ruined us. Not a single 
member, so far as I am aware, is prepared to pro- 
test against the peace, or is anything but de- 
lighted to think that the war is over. At the 
same time we do feel that if we could have had 
a longer notice, six months for instance, we could 
have braced ourselves better to stand up against 
it and meet the blow when it fell. 

I think, too, that our feeUng is shared outside. 



5. — The War News as I Remember it 



EVERYBODY, I think, should make some 
little contribution towards keeping alive 
the memories of the great war. In the 
larger and heroic sense this is aheady being done. 
But some of the minor things are apt to be 
neglected. When the record of the war has been 
rewritten into real history, we shall be in danger 
of forgetting what WAR NEWS was Hke and the 
pecuHar kind of thrill that accompanied its 
perusaL 

Hence in order to preserve it for all time I 
embalm some little samples of it, selected of 
course absolutely at random, — as such things 
always are — in the pages of this book. 

Let me begin with: — 

I 

THE CABLE NEWS FROM RUSSIA 

This was the great breakfast-table feature for 
at least three years. Towards the end of the 
war some people began to complain of it. They 

153 



154 The Hohenzollerns in America 

said that they questioned whether it was accurate. 
Here for example is one fortnight of it. 

Petrogradj April 14. Word has reached here 
that the Germans have captured enormous 
quantities of grain on the Ukrainian border. 

April 15. The Germans have captured no 
grain on the Ukrainian border. The country is 
swept bare. 

April 16. Everybody in Petrograd is starving. 

April 17. There is no lack of food in Petro- 
grad. 

April 18. The death of General Korniloff is 
credibly reported this morning. 

April 19. It is credibly reported this morning 
that General Korniloff is ahve. 

April 20. It is credibly reported that General 
Korniloff is hovering between Hfe and death. 

April 21. The Bolsheviki are overthrown. 

April 22. The Bolsheviki got up again. 

April 23. The Czar died last night. 

April 24. The Czar did not die last night. 

April 25. General Kaleidescope and his Cos- 
sacks are moving north. 

April 26. General Kaleidescope and his Cos- 
sacks are moving south. 

April 27. General Kaleidescope and his Cos- 
sacks are moving east. 



Echoes of the War 155 

April 2S. General Kaleidescope and his Cos- 
sacks are moving west. 

April 29. It is reported that the Cossacks 
under General Kaleidescope have revolted. They 
demand the Maximum. General Kaleidescope 
hasn't got it. 

April 30. The National Pan-Russian Con- 
stituent Universal Duma which met this morning 
at ten-thirty, was dissolved at twenty-five minutes 
to eleven. 

My own conclusion, reached with deep regret, 
is that the Russians are not yet fit for the blessings 
of the Magna Charta and the Oklahama Con- 
stitution of 1907. They ought to remain for 
some years yet under the Interstate Commerce 
Commission. 

II 

SAMPLE OF SPECIAL CORRESPONDENCE 

New York (through London via Holland and 
coming out at Madrid). Mr. O. Howe Lurid, 
our special correspondent, writing from "Some- 
where near Somewhere'' and describing the 
terrific operations of which he has just been an 
eyewitness, says: 

"From the crest where I stood, the whole 



156 The Hohenzollerns in America 

landscape about me was illiiminated with the 
fierce glare of the bursting shells, while the ground 
on which I stood quivered with the thunderous 
detonation of the artillery. 

"Nothing in the imagination of a Dante could 
have equalled the lurid and pyrogriffic grandeur 
of the scene. Streams of fire rose into the sky, 
falling in bifurcated crystallations in all directions. 
Disregarding all personal danger, I opened one 
eye and looked at it. 

"I found myself now to be the very centre of 
the awful conflict. While not stating that the 
whole bombardment was directed at me per- 
sonally, I am pretty sure that it was." 

I admit that there was a time, at the very 
beginning of the war, when I liked this kind of 
thing served up with my bacon and eggs every 
morning, in the days when a man could eat 
bacon and eggs without being labelled a pro- 
German. Later on I came to prefer the simple 
statements as to the same scene and event, given 
out by Sir Douglas Haig and General Pershing — 
after this fashion: 

"Last night at ten-thirty p.m. our men noticed 
signs of a Hght bombardment apparently coming 
from the German lines." 



Echoes of the War 157 



m 

THE TECHNICAL WAR DESPATCHES 

The best of these, as I remember them, used to 
come from the ItaUan front and were done after 
this fashion : — 

"Tintino, near Trombono. Friday, April 3. 
The Germans, as I foresaw last month they 
would, have crossed the Piave in considerable 
force. Their position, as I said it would be, is 
now very strong. The mountains bordering the 
valley run — just as I foresaw they would — 
from northwest to southeast. The country in 
front is, as I anticipated, flat. Venice is, as I 
assured my readers it would be, about thirty 
miles distant from the Piave, which falls, as I 
expected it would, into the Adriatic." 

IV 

THE WAR PROPHECIES 

Startling Prophecy in Paris, All Paris is wildly 
excited over the extraordinary prophecy of 
Madame Cleo de Clichy that the war will be over 
in four weeks. Madame Cleo, who is now as 
widely known as a diseuse, a hseuse, a friseuse 
and a clairvoyante, leaped into sudden prominence 



158 The Hohenzollerns in America 

last November by her startling announcement 
that the seven letters in the Kaiser's name 
Wilhelm represented the seven great beasts 
of the apocalypse; in the next month she elec- 
trified all Paris by her disclosure that the four 
letters of the word Czar — by substituting the 
figure I for C, 9 for Z, i for A, and 7 for R — 
produce the date 191 7, and indicated a revolution 
in Russia. The salon of Madame Cleo is besieged 
by eager crowds night and day. She may proph- 
esy again at any minute. 

Startling Forecast. A Russian peasant, living 
in Semipalatinsk, has foretold that the war will 
end in August. The wildest excitement prevails 
not only in Semipalatinsk but in the whole of it. 

Extraordinary Prophecy. Rumbumbabad, In- 
dia. April I. The whole neighbourhood has 
been thrown into a turmoil by the prophecy of 
Ram Slim, a Yogi of this district, who has foretold 
that the war will be at an end in September. 
People are pouring into Rumbumbabad in ox-carts 
from all directions. Business in Rimabimibabad 
is at a standstill. 

Excitement in Midgevilky Ohio. William Bes- 
semer Jones, a retired farmer of Cuyahoga, Ohio, 



Echoes of the War 159 

has foretold that the war will end in October. 
People are flocking into Midgeville in lumber 
wagons from aU parts of the country. Jones, 
who bases his prophecy on the Bible, had hitherto 
been thought to be half-witted. This is now 
recognised to have been a wrong estimate of his 
powers. Business in Midgeville is at a standstill. 

Dog^s Foot, Wyoming, April i. An Indian 
of the Cheyenne tribe has foretold that the war 
will end in December. Business among the 
Indians is at a standstill. 

V 

DIPLOMATIC REVELATIONS 

These were sent out in assortments, and 
labelled Vienna, via London, through Stockholm. 
After reading them with feverish eagerness for 
nearly four years, I decided that they somehow 
lack definiteness. Here is the way they ran: 

'^Special Correspondence. I learn from a very 
high authority, whose name I am not at Hberty 
to mention, (speaking to me at a place which I 
am not allowed to indicate and in a language 
which I am forbidden to use) — that Austria- 
Hungary is about to take a diplomatic step of the 



160 The Hohenzollerns in America 

highest importance. What this step is, I am 
forbidden to say. But the consequences of it — 
which unfortunately I am pledged not to disclose 
— will be such as to effect results which I am not 
free to enumerate. 

VI 
A NEW GERMAN PEACE FORMULA 

Dr. Hertling, the Imperial Chancellor, speak- 
ing through his hat in the Reichstag, said that he 
wished to state in the clearest language of which 
he was capable that the German peace plan 
would not only provide the fullest self determina- 
tion of all ethnographic categories, but would 
predicate the pohtical self consciousness {poli- 
tisckes Selhstbewusztsein) of each geographical 
and entomological imit, subject only to the 
necessary rectihnear guarantees for the seismo- 
graphic action of the German empire. The 
entire Reichstag, especially the professorial section 
of it, broke into unrestrained applause. It is 
felt that the new formula is the equivalent of a 
German Magna Carta — or as near to it as they 
can get. 



Echoes of the War 161 

VII 
THE FINANCIAL NEWS 

The war finance, as I remember it, always 
supplied items of the most absorbing interest. 
I do not mean to say that I was an authority on 
finance or held any official position in regard to it. 
But I watched it. I followed it in the newspapers. 
When the war began I knew nothing about it. 
But I picked up a little bit here and a httle bit 
there imtil presently I felt that I had a grasp on 
it not easily shaken off. 

It was a simple matter, anyway. Take the 
case of the rouble. It rose and it fell. But the 
reason was always perfectly obvious. The Rus- 
sian news ran, as I got it in my newspapers, like 
this: — 

^^M. Touchusoff, the new financial secretary 
of the Soviet, has declared that Russia will repay 
her utmost liabilities. Roubles rose." 

"M. Touchusoff, the late financial secretary 
of the Soviet, was thrown into the Neva last 
evening. Roubles fell.'' 

"M. Gorky, speaking in London last night, said 
that Russia was a great country. Roubles rose." 

'^A Dutch correspondent, who has just beat his 



162 The Hohenzollerns in America 

way out of Russia, reports that nothing will 
induce him to go back. Roubles fell." 

"Mr. Arthur Balfour, speaking in the House 
of Commons last night, paid a glowing tribute 
to the memory of Peter the Great. Roubles 
rose." 

"The local Bolsheviki of New York City at the 
Pan-Russian Congress held in Murphy's Rooms, 
Fourth Avenue, voted unanimously in favor of 
a Free Russia. Roubles never budged." 

With these examples in view, anybody, I 
think, could grasp the central principles of Rus- 
sian finance. AU that one needed to know was 
what M. Touchusoff and such people were going 
to say, and who would be thrown into the Neva, 
and the rise and fall of the rouble could be foreseen 
to a kopeck. In speculation by shrewd people 
with proper judgment as to when to buy and 
when to sell the rouble, large fortunes could be 
made, or even lost, in a day. 

But after all the Russian finance was simple. 
That of our German enemies was much more 
compHcated and yet infinitely more successful. 
That at least I gathered from the little news 
items in regard to German finance that used 
to reach us in cables that were headed Via Tim- 
buctoo and ran thus: — 



Echoes of the War 163 

"The fourth Imperial War Loan of four billioa 
marks, to be known as the Kaiser's War Loan, 
was oversubscribed to-day in five minutes. In- 
vestors thronged the banks, with tears in their 
eyes, bringing with them everything that they 
had. The bank managers, themselves stained 
with tears, took everything that was offered. 
Each investor received a button proudly displayed 
by the too-happy-for-words out-of-the-bank-hust- 
ling recipient." 



6.— Some Just Complaints About the War 



NO patriotic man would have cared to lift 
up his voice against the Government in 
war time. Personally, I should not want 
to give utterance even now to anything in the 
way of criticism. But the complaints which were 
presented below came to me, unsought and unso- 
Hcited, and represented such a variety of sources 
and such just and unselfish points of view that 
I think it proper, for the sake of history, to 
offer them to the public. 

I give them, just as they reached me, without 
modifications of any sort. 

The just complaint of Mr. Threadier, my tailor, 
as expressed while measuring me for my Win-the- 
War autumn suit, 

"Complaint, sir? Oh, no, we have no com- 
plaint to make in our Une of business, none what- 
ever {forty-two, Mr. Jephson). It would hardly 
become us to complain {side pockets, Mr. Jephson). 
But we think, perhaps, it is rather a mistake for 

164 



Echoes of the War 165 

the Government {thirty-three on the leg) to en- 
courage the idea of economy in dress. Our 
attitude is that the well dressed man (a little 
fuller in the chest? Yes, a little fuller in the chest, 
please, Mr. Jephson) is better able to serve his 
country than the man who goes about in an old 
suit. The motto of our trade is Thrift with 
Taste. It was made up in our spring convention 
of five hundred members, in a four day sitting. 
We feel it to be {twenty-eight) very appropriate. 
Our feehng is that a gentleman wearing one of 
our thrift worsteds under one of our Win-the- 
War hght overcoats {Mr. Jephson, please show 
that new Win-the-War overcoating) is really help- 
ing to keep things going. We like to reflect, 
sir {nothing in shirtings, today?) that we're doing 
our bit, too, in presenting to the enemy an un- 
disturbed nation of well dressed men. Nothing 
else, sir? The week after next? Ah! If we 
can, sir! but we're greatly rushed with our new 
and patriotic Thrift orders. Good morning, sir." 

The just complaint of Madame Pavalucini, the 
celebrated contralto. As interviewed incidentally 
in the palm-room of The Slitz Hotel, over a cup of 
tea {one dollar), French Win-the-War pastry {one 
fifty) and Help-the-Navy cigarettes {fifty). 



166 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"I would not want to creetecize ze gouvermen' 
ah! non! That would be what you call a skonk 
treeck, hein?" {Madame Pavalucini comes from 
Missouri, and dares not talk any other kind oj 
English than this, while on tour, with any strangers 
listening.) "But, I ask myself, ees it not just 
a leetle wrong to discourage and tax ze poor 
artistes? We are doing our beet, hein? We 
seeng, we recite! I seeng so many beautiful 
sings to ze soldiers; sings about love, and youth, 
and passion, and spring and kisses. And the 
men are carried off their feet. They rise. They 
rush to the war. I have seen them, in my patriotic 
concerts where I accept nothing but my expenses 
and my fee and give all that is beyond to the war. 
Only last night one arose, right in the front rank 
— the fauteuils d'orchestre, I do not know how you 
caU them in English. ^Let me out of zis,' he 
scream, 'me for the war! Me for the trenches!' 
Was it not magnifique — what you call splendide, 
hein? 

"And then ze gouvermen' come and tell me 
I must pay zem ten thousan' doUars, when I make 
only seexty thousan' dollars at ze opera! Anozzer 
skonk treeck, hein?" 

The just complaint of Mr, Crunch, income tax 



Echoes of the War 167 

payer, as imparted to me over his own port wine, 
after dinner. 

"No, I shouldn^t want to complain: I mean, 
in any way that would reach the outside, — reach 
it, that is, in connection with my name. Though 
I think that the thing ought to be said by some- 
body, I think you might say it. (Let me pour 
you out another glass of this Conquistador: 
yes, it's the old '87: but I suppose we'll never 
get any more of it on this side: they say that the 
rich Spaniards are making so much money they're 
buying up every cask of it and it will never be 
exported again. Just another illustration of the 
way that the war hits everybody alike.) But, 
as I was saying, I think if you were to raise a 
complaint about the income tax, you'd find the 
whole country — I mean all the men with in- 
comes — behind you. I don't suppose they'd 
want you to mention their names. But they'd 
be behind you, see? They'd all be there. (Will 
you try one of these Googoolias? They're the 
very best, but I guess we'll never see them again. 
They say the rich Cubans are buying them up. 
So the war hits us there, too.) As I see it, the 
income tax is the greatest mistake the govern- 
ment ever made. It hits the wrong man. It 
falls on the man with an income and lets the 



168 The Hohenzollerns in America 

other man escape. The way I look at it, and 
the way all the men that will be behind you look 
at it, is that if a man sticks tight to it and goes 
on earning all the income he can, he's doing his 
bit, in his own way, to win the war. All we ask 
is to be let alone (don't put that in your notes 
as from me, but you can say it), let us alone to 
go on quietly piling up income till we get the 
Germans hcked. But if you start to take away 
our income, you discourage us, you knock all 
the patriotism out of us. To my mind, a man's 
income and his patriotism are the same thing. 
But, of course, don't say that / said that." 

The just complaint of my barbery as expressed 
in the pauses of his operations, 

"I'm not saying nothing against the Govern- 
ment {any facial massage this morning?), I guess 
they know their own business, or they'd ought 
to, anyway. But I kick at all this talk against 
the barber business in war time {will I singe 
them ends a bit?). The papers are full of it, all 
the time. I don't see much else in them. Last 
week I saw where a feller said that all the barber 
shops ought to be closed up {bay rum?) till the 
war was over. Say, I'd like to have him right 
here in this chair with a razor at his throat. 



Echoes of the War 169 

the way I have you! As I see it, the barber 
business is the most necessary business in the 
whole war. A man'll get along without every- 
thing else, just about, but he can't get along 
without a shave, can he? — or not without losing 
all the pep and self-respect that keeps him going. 
They say them fellers over in France has to shave 
every morning by military order: if they didn't 
the Germans would have 'em beat. I say the 
barber is doing his bit as much as any man. I 
was to Washington four months last winter, and 
I done all the work of three senators and two 
congressmen (will I clip that neck ?) and I done the 
work of a United States Admiral every Saturday 
night. If that ain't war work, show me what is. 
But I don't kick, I just go along. If a man appre- 
ciates what I do, and likes to pay a Httle extra 
for it, why so much the better, but if he's low 
enough to get out of this chair you're in and 
walk off without giving a cent more than he has to, 
why let him go. But, sometimes, when I get 
thinking about all this outcry about barber's 
work in war time, I feel like following the man to 
the door and sHtting his throat for him. . . . 
Thank you, sir; thank you, sir. Good morning. 
Next!" 



170 The Hohenzollerns in America 

The just complaint of Mr, Singlestone; — for- 
merly Mr. Einstein, Theatre Proprietor. 

"I would be the last man, the very last, to 
say one word against the Government. I think 
they are doing fine. I think the boys in the 
trenches are doing fine. I think the nation is 
doing fine. But, if there's just one thing where 
they're wrong, it's in the matter of the theatres. 
I think it would be much better for the Govern- 
ment not to attempt to cut down or regulate 
theatres in any way. The theatre is the people's 
recreation. It builds them up. It's aU part of 
a great machine to win the war. I like to stand 
in the box office and see the money come in and 
feel that the theatre is doing its bit. But, mind 
you, I think the President is doing fine. So, all 
I say is, I think the theatres ought to be allowed 
to do fine, too." 

The just complaint of Mr. Silas Eeck, farmer, 
as interviewed by me, incognito, at the counter of 
the Gold Dollar Saloon, 

"Yes, sir, I say the Government's in the 
wrong, and I don't care who hears me. (Say, 
is that feller in the slick overcoat listening? 
Let's move along a Httle further.) They're 
right to carry on the war for all the nation is 



Echoes of the War 171 

worth. That's sound and I'm with 'em. But 
they ought not to take the farmer offen his farm. 
There I'm agin them. The farmer is the one 
man necessary for the country. They say they 
want bacon for the Alhes. Well, the way I 
look at it is, if you want bacon, you need hogs. 
And if there are no men left in the country like 
me, what'll you do for hogs! 

"Thanks, was you paying for that? I guess 
we won't have another, eh? Two of them things 
might be bad for a feller." 

So, when I used to Hsten to the complaints of 
this sort that rose on every side, I was glad that 
I was not President of the United States. 

At the same time I do think that the Govern- 
ment makes a mistake in taxing the profits of 
the poor book writers under the absurd name 
of income. But let that go. The Kaiser would 
probably treat us worse. 



7.— Some Startling Side Effects of the War 



THERE is no doubt," said Mr. Taft re- 
cently, '^that the war is destined to effect 
the most profound uplift and changes, 
not only in our political outlook, but upon our 
culture, our thought and, most of all, upon our 
literature." 

I am not absolutely certain that Mr. Taft 
really said this. He may not have said "uplift." 
But I seem to have heard something about up- 
lift, somewhere. At any rate, there is no doubt 
of the fact that our Uterature has moved — up 
or down. Yes, the war is not only destined to 
affect our literature, but it has already done so. 
The change in outlook, in Hterary style, in mode 
of expression, even in the words themselves is 
already here. 

Anybody can see it for himself by turning over 
the pages of our fashionable novels or by looking 
at the columns of our great American and EngUsh 
newspapers and periodicals. 

But stop, — let me show what I mean by ex- 
amples. I have them here in front of me. Take, 

172 



Echoes of the War 173 

for example, the London Spectator. Everybody 
recognised in it a model of literary dignity and 
decorum. Even those who read it least, ad- 
mitted this most wilHngly; in fact, perhaps all 
the more so. In its pages to-day one finds an 
equal dignity of thought, yet, somehow, the 
wording seems to have undergone an alteration. 
One cannot say just where the change comes in. 
It is what the French call 3.je ne sais quoi, a some- 
thing insaisissable, a sort of nuance, not amount- 
ing of course to a lueur, but still, — how shall one 
put it, — something. 

The example that is given below was taken 
almost word for word (indeed some of the words 
actually were so) from the very latest copy of 
The Spectator. 



EDITORIAL FROM THE LONDON 
"SPECTATOR" 

Showing the Stimulating Effect of the War on Its 
Literary Style 

"There is no doubt that our boys, and the 
Americans, are going some on the western front. 
We have no hesitation in saying that last week's 
scrap was a cinch for the boys. It is credibly 
reported by our correspondent at The Hague 



174 The Hohenzollerns in America 

that the German Emperor, the Crown Prince and 
a number of other guys were eye witnesses of the 
fight. If so, they got the surprise of their young 
Hves. While we should not wish to show any- 
thing less than the chivalrous consideration for a 
beaten enemy which has been a tradition of our 
nation, we feel it is but just to say that for once 
the dirty pups got what was coming to them. 
We are glad to learn from official quarters that 
His Majesty King George has been graciously 
pleased to telegraph to General Pershing, *Soak 
it to 'em — and then some.' 

"Meantime the situation from the point of 
view both of terrain and of tactics remains alto- 
gether in our favour. The deep salient driven 
into the German lines near Soissons threatens 
to break up their communications and force a 
withdrawal on a wide front. We cannot make the 
position clearer to our English readers than by say- 
ing that our new lines occupy, as it were, the form 
of a baseball diamond, with Soissons at second base 
and with our headquarters at the home plate and 
our artillery support at third. Our readers will 
at once grasp the fact that, with our advance 
pivoted on the pitcher's box and with adequate 
cover at short, the thing is a lead-pipe cinch, — 
in fact, we have them lashed to the mast. 



Echoes of the War 175 

^^ Meantime the mood of the hour should be 
one, not of undue confidence or boastfulness, but 
of quiet resolution and deep thankfulness. As 
the Archbishop of Canterbury so feeHngly put 
it in his sermon in Westminster Abbey last 
Sunday, 'Now that we have them by the neck 
let us go on, in deep and steadfast purpose, till 
we have twisted the gizzard out of them.' 

"The Archbishop's noble words should, and 
will, re-echo in every English home." 

Critical people may be inclined to doubt the 
propriety, or even the propinquity, of some of the 
Hterary changes due to the war. But there can 
be no doubt of the excellent effect of one of them, 
namely, the increasing knowledge and use among 
us of the pleasant language of France. It is no 
exaggeration to say that, before the war, few 
people in the United States, even among the 
colored population, spoke French with ease. 
In fact, in some cases the discomfort was so 
obvious as to be almost painful. This is now 
entirely altered. Thanks to our military guide- 
books, and to the general feeling of the day, our 
citizens are setting themselves to acquire the 
language of our gallant ally. And the signs are 
that they will do it. One hears every day in 



176 The Hohenzollerns in America 

metropolitan society such remarks as, "Have you 
read, ^Soo le foo?^^^ "Oh, you mean that book 
by Haingri Barbooze? No, I have not read it 
yet, but I have read 'Mong Swassant Quinz^ 
you know, by that other man." 

This is hopeful indeed. Nor need we wonder 
that our best magazines are reflecting the same 
tendency. 

Here for instance are the opening sentences of 
a very typical serial now running in one of our 
best periodicals: for all I know the rest of the 
sentences may be like them. At any rate, any 
magazine reader will recognize them at once: 

BONNE MERE PITOU 
A Conte of Old Normandy 

Bonne Mere Pitou sat spinning beside the 
porte of the humble chaumiere in which she 
dwelt. From time to time her eyes looked up 
and down the gran^ route that passed her door. 

"/Z ne vient pas,^ she murmured (he does not 
come). 

She rose wearily and went dedans. Presently 
she came out again, dehors. '^11 ne vient toujours 
pas,^^ she sighed (he still does not come). 

About her in the tall trees of the allee the 



Echoes of the War 177 

percherons twittered while the soft roucoulement 
of the bees murmured drowsily in the tall calice 
of the chou-fleur. 

'^11 71' est pas venu,'" she said (perfect tense, 
third singular, he is not, or has not, come). 

Can we blame him if he didn't? No doubt 
he was still studying his active verb before tack- 
ling Mere Pitou. 

But there! Let it pass. In any case it is not 
only the magazines, but the novels themselves, 
that are being transformed by the war. Wit- 
ness this: 

BY ONE OF OUR MOST POPULAR 
NOVELISTS 

"It was in the summer house, at the foot of 
the old garden, that the awaited declaration 
came. Edwin kneeled at Angelina's feet. At 
last they were alone! The successful barrage 
of conversation which he had put up at breakfast 
had compelled her mother to remain in her 
trenches, and had driven her father to the shelter 
of his dug-out. Her younger brother he had 
camouflaged with the present of a new fishing 
rod, thus inducing him to retire to the river. 
The communications with the servants had been 



178 The Hohenzollerns in America 

cut. Of the strict neutrality of the gardener 
he was ahready assured. Edwin felt that the 
moment had come for going over the top. Yet 
being an able strategist, he was anxious not to 
attempt to advance on too wide a front. 

"Angelina!" he exclaimed, raising himself to 
one knee with his hands outstretched toward her. 

The girl started as at the sound of an air bomb; 
for a moment she elevated her eyes and looked 
him full in the tangent, then she lowered them 
again but continued to observe him through her 
mental periscope. 

"Angelina," he repeated, "I have a declara- 
tion to make." 

"As from what date?" she questioned quietly. 

Edwin drew his watch from his pocket. 

"As from this morning, at ten-forty-six," he 
said. Then, emboldened by her passive attitude, 
he continued with rising passion in his tone. 

"Ever since I first met you I have felt that I 
could not Hve without you. I am a changed man. 
My cahbre is altered. I feel ten centimeters 
wider in the mouth than I did six weeks ago. 
I feel that my path is altered. I have a new 
range and an angle of elevation such as I never 
experienced before. I have hidden my love as 
best I could till now. I have worn a moral gas- 



Echoes of the War 179 

mask before your family. I can do so no longer. 
Angelina, will you be mine, forming with me a 
single unit, drawing our rations from the same 
field kitchen and occupying the same divisional 
headquarters?" 

The girl seemed to hesitate. She raised her 
eyes to his. 

"We know one another so Httle,'^ she mur- 
mured. 

Edwin felt that his offensive was failing. He 
therefore hastened to bring up his means of sup- 
port. 

"I have an ample income of my own," he 
pleaded. 

AngeHna raised her eyes again. It was evident 
that she was about to surrender. But at this 
moment her mother's voice was heard calling, 
"Angelina, AngeUna, my dear, where are you?" 

The barrage had broken down. 

"Quick," said the girl, "mobilize yourself. 
Pick up that tennis racket and let us hurry to 
the court and dig ourselves in." 

"But my declaration," urged Edwin eagerly. 

"Accepted," she said, "as from eleven-two 
this morning." 



V. — other Impossibilities 



1. — The Art of Conversation 



HOW TO INTRODUCE TWO PEOPLE 
TO ONE ANOTHER 

Nothing is more important in introducing 
two people to each other than to employ a fitting 
form of words. The more usually recognized 
forms are easily learned and committed to memory 
and may be utihzed as occasion requires. I pass 
over such rudimentary formulas as "Ed, shake 
hands with Jim Taylor/' or, "Boys, this is Pete, 
the new hand; Pete, get hold of the end of that 
cant-hook." In fact, we are speaking only of 
poHte society as graced by the fair sex, the only 
kind that we need care about. 

TJte Third Avenue Procedure 

A very neat and convenient form is that in 
vogue in Third Avenue circles, New York, as, 
for instance, at a fifty-cents-a-head dance (ladies 
free) in the hall of the Royal Knights of Benevo- 
lence. 

183 



184 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"Miss Summerside, meet Mr. O'Hara," after 
which Miss Summerside says very distinctly, 
"Mr. O'Hara/' and Mr. O'Hara says with equal 
clearness "Miss Summerside.'' In this circle a 
mark of exquisite breeding is found in the request 
to have the name repeated. "I don't quite 
catch the name!" says Mr. O'Hara critically; 
then he catches it and repeats it — "Miss Sum- 
merside." 

"Catching the name" is a necessary part of 
this social encounter. If not caught the first 
time it must be put over again. The peculiar 
merit of this introduction is that it lets Miss 
Summerside understand clearly that Mr. O'Hara 
never heard of her before. That helps to keep 
her in her place. 

In superior circles, however, introduction be- 
comes more elaborate, more flattering, more 
unctuous. It reaches its acme in what everyone 
recognizes at once as 

The Clerical Method 

This is what would be instinctively used in 
Anglican circles — as, for example, by the Epis- 
copal Bishop of Boof in introducing a Canon 
of the Church to one of the "lady workers" of 
the congregation (meaning a lady too rich to work) 



Other Impossibilities 185 

who is expected to endow a crib in the Diocesan 
Home for Episcopal Cripples. A certain quan- 
tity of soul has to be infused into this introduc- 
tion. Anybody who has ever heard it can fill in 
the proper accentuation, which must be very rich 
and deep. 

"Oh, Mrs. Putitover, may I introduce my very 
dear old friend. Canon Cutitout? The Canon, 
Mrs. Putitover, is one of my dearest friends. 
Mrs. Putitover, my dear Canon, is quite one of 
our most enthusiastic workers." 

After which outburst of soul the Bishop is 
able to add, '^Will you excuse me, I'm afraid 
I simply must run." 

Personally, I have never known or met a Bishop 
in society in any other situation than just about 
to run. Where they run to, I do not know. 
But I think I understand what they run from. 

The Lounge Room of the Club 

Equally high in the social scale but done 
quite differently is the Club Introduction. It 
is done by a club man who, for the Hfe of him, 
can't remember the names of either of the two 
club men whom he is introducing, and who each, 
for the life of him, can't think of the name of the 
man they are being introduced by. It runs — 



186 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"Oh, I say, I beg your pardon — I thought, 
of course, you two fellows knew one another 

perfectly well — let me introduce — urr 

wurr " 

Later on, after three whiskey-and-sodas, each 
of the three finds out the names of the other two, 
surreptitiously from the hall porter. But it makes 
no difference. They forget them again anyway. 

Now let us move up higher, in fact, very high. 
Let us approach the real thing. 

Introdtcction to H. E. the Viceroy of India, 
K.C.B., K.C.S.L, S.O.S. 

The most exalted form of introduction is seen 
in the presentation of Mr. Tomkins, American 
tourist, to H. E. the Viceroy of India. An aide- 
de-camp in uniform at the foot of a grand staircase 
shouts, ''Mr. Tomkins!" An aide-de-camp at 
the top (one minute later) calls "Mr. Thompson"; 
another aide, four feet further on, calls "Mr. 
Torps." 

Then a mihtary secretary, standing close to 
His Excellency, takes Mr. Tomkins by the neck 
and bends him down toward the floor and says 
very clearly and distinctly, "Mr. Torpentine." 
Then he throws him out by the neck into the 
crowd beyond and calls for another. The thing 



Other Impossibilities 187 

is done. Mr. Tomkins wipes the perspiration 
from his hair with his handkerchief and goes 
back at full speed to the Hoogli Hotel, Calcutta, 
eager for stationery to write at once to Ohio and 
say that he knows the Viceroy. 

The Office Introduction^ One-sided 

This introduction comes into our office, sUp- 
ping past whoever keeps the door with a packet of 
books under its arm. It says — 

"Ledd me introduze myself. The book propo- 
sition vidge I am introduzing is one vidge ve are 
now pudding on the market . . .'' 

Then, of two things, one — 

Either a crash of glass is heard as the speaker 
is hurled through the skylight, or he walks out 
twenty minutes later, bowing profusely as he goes, 
and leaving us gazing in remorse at a signed 
document entithng us to receive the "Master- 
pieces of American Poetry'' in sixty volumes. 

On the Stage 

Everything on the stage is done far better than 
in real life. This is true of introductions. There 
is a warmth, a soul, in the stage introduction not 
known in the chilly atmosphere of everyday 
society. Let me quote as an example of a stage 



188 The Hohenzollerns in America 

introduction the formula used, in the best melo- 
dramatic art, in the kitchen-living-room (stove 
right centre) of the New England farm. 

''Neighbour Jephson's son, this is my little gal, 
as good and sweet a Uttle gal, as mindful of her 
old father, as you'll find in all New England. 
Neighbour Jephson's son, she's been my all in 
all to me, this little gal, since I laid her mother 
in the ground five Christmases ago — " The 
speaker is slightly overcome and leans against 
a cardboard clock for strength: he recovers and 
goes on — "Hope, this is Neighbour Jephson's 
son, new back from over the seas, as fine a lad, 
gal, if he's like the folk that went before him, 
as ever followed the sea. Hope, your hand. 
My boy, your hand. See to his comfort, Hope, 
while I go and read the Good Book a spell in the 
barnyard." 

The Indian Formula 

Many people, tired of the empty phrases of 
society, look back wistfully to the simple direct 
speech of savage life. Such persons will find 
useful the usual form of introduction (the shorter 
form) prevalent among our North American 
Indians (at least as gathered from the best literary 
model) : 



Other Impossibilities 189 

"Friends and comrades who are worthy, 
See and look with all yotir eyesight, 
Listen with your sense of hearing. 
Gather with your apprehension — 
Bow your heads, O trees, and hearken. 
Hush thy rustling, corn, and listen; 
Turn thine ear and give attention; 
Ripples of the running water, 
Pause a moment in your channels — 
Here I bring you, — Hiawatha." 

The last line of this can be changed to suit the 
particular case. It can just as easily read, at 
the end, "Here is Henry Edward Eastwood," or, 
"Here is Hal McGiverin, Junior," or anything 
else. All names fit the sense. That, in fact, 
was the wonderful art of Longfellow — the sense 
being independent of the words. 

The Platform Introduction 
Here is a form of introduction cruelly familiar 
to those who know it. It is used by the sour- 
looking villain facetiously called in newspaper 
reports the "genial chairman" of the meeting. 
While he is saying it the victim in his Httle chair 
on the platform is a target for the eyes of a thou- 
sand people who are wondering why he wears odd 
socks. 



190 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"The next speaker, ladies and gentlemen, is 
one who needs no introduction to this gathering. 
His name" (here the chairman consults a Httle 
card) "is one that has become a household word. 
His achievements in" (here the chairman looks 
at his card again, studies it, turns it upside down 
and adds) "in many directions are famiHar to 
all of you." There is a feeble attempt at applause 
and the chairman then Hfts his hand and says 
in a plain business-like tone — "Will those of the 
audience who are leaving kindly step as lightly 
as possible." He is about to sit down, but then 
adds as a pleasant afterthought for the speaker 
to brood over — "I may say, while I am on my 
feet, that next week our society is to have a 
real treat in hearing — et cetera and so forth — " 

n 

HOW TO OPEN A CONVERSATION 

After the ceremony of introduction is completed 
the next thing to consider is the proper way to 
open a conversation. The beginning of con- 
versation is really the hardest part. It is the 
social equivalent to "going over the top." It 
may best be studied in the setting and surround- 
ings of the Evening Reception, where people 



Other Impossibilities 191 

stand upright and agonise, balancing a dish of 
ice-cream. Here conversation reaches its highest 
pitch of social importance. One must talk or 
die. Something may be done to stave it off a 
little by vigorous eating. But the food at such 
affairs is limited. There comes a point when it is 
absolutely necessary to say something. 

The beginning, as I say, is the hardest problem. 
Other communities solve it better than we do. 

The Chinese System 

In China conversation, between strangers after 
introduction, is always opened by the question, 
"And how old are you?^' This strikes me as 
singularly apt and sensible. Here is the one 
thing that is common ground between any two 
people, high or low, rich or poor — how far are 
you on your pilgrimage in life? 

The Penetentiary Method 

Compare with the Chinese method the grim, 
but very significant formula that is employed 
(I believe it is a literal fact) in the exercise yards 
of the American penitentiaries. "What have 
you brought?" asks the San Quentin or Sing 
Sing convict of the new arrival, meaning, "And 
how long is your sentence?" There is the same 



192 The Hohenzollerns in America 

human touch about this, the same common 
ground of interest, as in the Chinese formula. 

Polite Society 

But in our poHte society we have as yet found 
no better method than beginning with a sort of 
medical diagnosis — "How do you do?" This 
admits of no answer. Convention forbids us to 
reply in detail that we are feeling if anything 
sHghtly lower than last week, but that though 
our temperature has risen from ninety-one-fifty 
to ninety-one-seventy-five, our respiration is still 
normal. 

Still worse is the weather as an opening topic. 
For it either begins and ends as abruptly as the 
medical diagnosis, or it leads the two talkers on 
into a long and miserable discussion of the weather 
of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, of 
last month, of last year and the last fifty years. 

Let one beware, however, of a conversation that 
begins too easily. 

The Mutual Friends^ Opening 
This can be seen at any evening reception, as 
when the hostess introduces two people who are 
supposed to have some special link to unite them 
at once with an instantaneous snap, as when, for 
instance, they both come from the same town. 



Other Impossibilities 193 

"Let me introduce Mr. Sedley," said the 
hostess. "I think you and Mr. Sedley are from 
the same town, Miss Smiles. Miss Smiles, Mr. 
Sedley." 

Off they go at a gallop. "I'm so deHghted to 
meet you,'' says Mr. Sedley. "It's good to hear 
from anybody who comes from our little town." 
(If he's a rollicking humourist, Mr. Sedley calls 
it his Uttle old "burg.") 

"Oh, yes," answers Miss Smiles. "I'm from 
Winnipeg too. I was so anxious to meet you to 
ask if you knew the McGowans. They're my 
greatest friends at home." 

"The — who?" asks Mr. Sedley. 

"The McGowans — on Selkirk Avenue." 

"No - o, I don't think I do. I know the Prices 
on Selkirk Avenue. Of course you know them." 

"The Prices? No, I don't beHeve I do — I 
don't think I ever heard of the Prices. You 
don't mean the Pearsons? I know them very 
well." 

"No, I don't know the Pearsons. The Prices 
live just near the reservoir." 

"No, then I'm sure I don't know them. The 
Pearsons live close to the coUege." 

"Close to the College? Is it near the William 
Kennedys?" 



194 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"I don't think I know the William Kennedys.'' 
This is the way the conversation goes on for 

ten minutes. Both Mr. Sedley and Miss Smiles 

are getting desperate. Their faces are fixed. 

Their sentences are reduced to — 
"Do you know the Petersons?" 
"No. Do you know the Appleby's?" 
"No. Do you know the Willie Johnsons?" 
"No." 
Then at last comes a rift in the clouds. One 

of them happens to mention Beverley Dixon. 

The other is able to cry exultingly — 

"Beverley Dixon? Oh, yes, rather. At least, 

I don't know him, but I used often to hear the 

Applebys speak of him." 

And the other exclaims with equal deHght — 
"I don't know him very well either, but I used 

to hear the WilHe Johnsons talk about him all 

the time." 
They are saved. 
Half an hour after they are still standing there 

talking of Beverly Dixon. 

The Etiquette Book 

Personally I have suffered so much from in- 
abihty to begin a conversation that not long ago 
I took the extreme step of buying a book on the 



Other Impossibilities 195 

subject. I regret to say that I got but little 
light or help from it. It was written by the 

Comtesse de Z . According to the preface the 

Comtesse had "moved in the highest circles of all 
the European capitals.'' If so, let her go on 
moving there. I for one, after trying her book, 
shall never stop her. This is how the Comtesse 
solves the problem of opening a conversation: 

"In commencing a conversation, the greatest 
care should be devoted to the selection of a topic, 
good taste demanding that one should sedulously 
avoid any subject of which one's vis-a-vis may be 
in ignorance. Nor are the mere words alone to 
be considered. In the art of conversation much 
depends upon manner. The true conversation- 
alist must, in opening, invest himself with an 
atmosphere of interest and solicitude. He must, 
as we say in French, be prepared to payer les 
irais de la conversation. In short, he must ^give 
himseh an air.'" 

There! Go and do it if you can. I admit 
that I can't. I have no idea what the French 
phrase above means, but I know that personally I 
cannot "invest myself with an atmosphere of 
interest." I might manage about two per cent 
on five hundred dollars. But what is that in these 
days of plutocracy? 



196 The Hohen%ollerns in America 

At any rate I tried the Comtesse's directions 
at a reception last week, on being introduced to 
an unknown lady. And they failed. I cut out 
nearly all the last part, and confined myseK 
merely to the proposed selection of a topic, en- 
deavouring to pick it with as much care as if I 
were selecting a golf club out of a bag. Naturally 
I had to confine myself to the few topics that I 
know about, and on which I can be quite interest- 
ing if I get started. 

"Do you know any mathematics?'' I asked. 

"No," said the lady. 

This was too bad. I could have shown her 
some good puzzles about the squares of the 
prime numbers up to forty-one. 

I paused and gave myself more air. 

"How are you," I asked, "on hydrostatics?" 

"I beg your pardon," she said. Evidently 
she was ignorant again. 

"Have you ever studied the principles of aerial 
navigation?" I asked. 

"No," she answered. 

I was pausing again and trying to invest myself 
with an air of further interest, when another man 
was introduced to her, quite evidently, from his 
appearance, a vapid jackass without one tenth 
of the brain calibre that I have. 



Other Impossibilities 197 

"Oh, how do you do?" he said. "I say, I've 
just heard that Harvard beat Princeton this 
afternoon. Great, isn't it?" 

In two minutes they were talking Uke old 
friends. How do these silly asses do it? 

When Dressed Hogs are Dull 

An equally unsuccessful type of conversation, 
often overheard at receptions, is where one of the 
two parties to it is too surly, too stupid, or too 
self-important and too rich to talk, and the 
other labours in vain. 

The surly one is, let us say, a middle-aged, 
thick-set man of the type that anybody recog- 
nizes under the name Money Hog. This kind 
of person, as viewed standing in his dress suit, 
mannerless and stupid, too rich to have to talk and 
too dull to know how to, always recalls to my 
mind the head-line of the market reports in the 
newspapers, "Dressed Hogs are Dull." 

The other party to the conversation is a win- 
some and agreeable woman, trying her best to 
do her social duty. 

But, tenez, as the Comtesse of Z would say, 

I can exactly illustrate the position and attitude 
of the two of them from a recollection of my 



198 The Hohenzollerns in America 

childhood. I remember that in one of my nur- 
sery books of forty years ago there was a picture 
entitled '^ The Lady in Love with A Swine J ^ A 
willowy lady in a shimmering gown leaned over 
the rail of a tessellated pig-sty, in which an im- 
possibly clean hog stood in an attitude of ill- 
mannered immobihty. With the picture was the 
rhyming legend, 

There was a Lady in love with a swine, 
^' Honey," said she, "will you be mine? 
I'll build you a silver sty 
And in it you shall lie." 
"Honk!" said He. 

There was something, as I recall it, in the 
sweet willingness of the Lady that was singularly 
appealing, and contrasted with the dull manner- 
less passivity of the swine. 

In each of the little stanzas that followed, the 
pretty advances of the Lady were rebuffed by a 
surly and monosyllabic "honk" from the hog. 

Here is the social counterpart of the scene in 
the picture-book. Mr. Grunt, capitalist, is stand- 
ing in his tessellated sty, — the tessellated sty 
being represented by the hardwood floor of a 
fashionable drawing-room. His face is just the 
same as the face of the pig in the picture-book. 



Other Impossibilities 199 

The willowy lady, in the same shimmering clothes 
and with the same pretty expression of eagerness, 
is beside him. 

"Oh, Mr. Grunt," she is saying, "how inter- 
esting it must be to be in your place and feel such 
tremendous power. Our hostess was just telling 
me that you own practically all the shoemaking 
machinery factories — it is shoe-making machin- 
ery, isn't it? — east of Pennsylvania." 

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt. 

"Shoe-making machinery," goes on the willowy 
lady (she really knows nothing and cares less 
about it) "must be absolutely fascinating, is it 
not?" 

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt. 

"But still you must find it sometimes a dread- 
ful strain, do you not? I mean, so much brain 
work, and that sort of thing." 

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt. 

"I should love so much to see one of your 
factories. They must be so interesting." 

"Honk!" says Mr. Grunt. Then he turns 
and moves away sideways. Into his httle piggy 
eyes has come a fear that the lady is going to ask 
him to subscribe to something, or wants a block 
of his common stock, or his name on a board of 
directors. So he leaves her. Yet if he had known 



200 The Hohenzollerns in America 

it she is probably as rich as he is, or richer, and 
hasn't the faintest interest in his factories, and 
never intends to go near one. Only she is fit 
to move and converse in poHte society and Mr. 
Grunt is not. 



2. Heroes and Heroines 



WHAT are you reading?" I asked the 
other day of a blue-eyed boy of ten 
curled up among the sofa cushions. 

He held out the book for me to see. 

^^ Dauntless Ned among the- Cannibals, ^^ he 
answered. 

"Is it exciting?'' I enquired. 

"Not very," said the child in a matter-of-fact 
tone. "But it's not bad." 

I took the book from him and read aloud at 
the opened page. 

"In a compact mass the gigantic savages rushed 
upon our hero, shrieking with rage and brandish- 
ing their huge clubs. Ned stood his ground 
fearlessly, his back to a banana tree. With a 
sweep of his cutlass he severed the head of the 
leading savage from his body, while with a back 
stroke of his dirk he stabbed another to the heart. 
But resistance against such odds was vain. By 
sheer weight of numbers, Ned was borne to the 
ground. His arms were then pinioned with 
stout ropes made of the fibres of the boobooda 

201 



202 The Hohenzollerns in America 

tree. With shrieks of exultation the savages 
dragged our hero to an opening in the woods 
where a huge fire was burning, over which was 
suspended an enormous caldron of bubbling oil. 
*Boil him, boil him,' yelled the savages, now 
wrought to the point of frenzy." 

"That seems fairly exciting, isn't it?" I said. 

"Oh, he won't get boiled," said the Httle boy. 
"He's the hero." 

So I knew that the child has already taken his 
first steps in the disillusionment of fiction. 

Of course he was quite right as to Ned. 
This wonderful youth, the hero with whom 
we all begin an acquaintance with books, passes 
imhurt through a thousand perils. Cannibals, 
Apache Indians, war, battles, shipwrecks, leave 
him quite unscathed. At the most Ned gets a 
flesh wound which is healed, in exactly one 
paragraph, by that wonderful drug called a 
"simple." 

But the most amazing thing about this partic- 
ular hero, the boy Ned, is the way in which he 
turns up in all the great battles and leading events 
of the world. 

It was Ned, for example, who at the critical 
moment at Gettysburg turned in his saddle to 
General Meade and said quietly, "General, the 



Other Impossibilities 203 

day is ours." "If it is/' answered Meade, as 
he folded his field glass, "you alone, Ned, have 
saved it.'' 

In the same way Ned was present at the crossing 
of the Delaware with Washington. Thus: — 

"'What do you see, Ned?' said Washington, 
as they peered from the leading boat into the 
driving snow. 

"'Ice,' said Ned. 'My boy,' said the Great 
American General, and a tear froze upon his face 
as he spoke, 'you have saved us aU. ' " 

Here is Ned at Runningmede when King John 
with his pen in hand was about to sign the Magna 
Carta. 

"For a moment the King paused irreso- 
lute, the upUfted quill in his hand, while his 
crafty, furtive eyes indicated that he might yet 
break his plighted faith with the assembled 
barons. 

"Ned laid his mailed hand upon the parch- 
ment. 

"'Sign it,' he said sternly, 'or take the conse- 
quences.' 

"The King signed. 

" ' Ned,' said the Baron de Bohun, as he removed 
his iron vizor from his bronze face, 'thou hast 
this day saved all England.'" 



204 The Hohenzollerns in America 

In the stories of our boyhood in which Ned 
figured, there was no such thing as a heroine, 
or practically none. At best she was brought 
in as an afterthought. It was announced on 
page three hundred and one that at the close of 
Ned's desperate adventures in the West Indies 
he married the beautiful daughter of Don Diego, 
the Spanish governor of Portobello; or else, at 
the end of the great war with Napoleon, that he 
married a beautiful and accompHshed French 
girl whose parents had perished in the Revo- 
lution. 

Ned generally married away from home. In 
fact his marriages were intended to cement 
the nations, torn asunder by Ned's military 
career. But sometimes he returned to his native 
town, all .sunburned, scarred and bronzed from 
battle (the bronzing effect of being in battle is 
always noted): he had changed from a boy to 
a man: that is, from a boy of fifteen to a man 
of sixteen. In such a case Ned marries in his 
own home town. It is done after this fashion: 

"But who is this who advances smiling to 
greet him as he crosses the famiUar threshold of 
the dear old house? Can this tall, beautiful 
girl be Gwendoline, the child-playmate of his 
boyhood?" 



Other Impossibilities 205 

Well, can it? I ask it of every experienced 
reader — can it or can it not? 

Ned had his day, in the boyhood of each 
of us. We presently passed him by. I am 
speaking, of course, of those of us who are of 
maturer years and can look back upon thirty 
or forty years of fiction reading. "Ned," flour- 
ishes still, I understand, among the children 
of today. But now he flies in aeroplanes, and 
dives in submarines, and gives his invaluable 
military advice to General Joflre and General 
Pershing. 

But with the oncoming of adolescent years 
something softer was needed than Ned with his 
howling cannibals and his fusillade of revolver 
shots. 

So the "Ned" of the Adventure Books was 
supplanted by the Romantic Heroine of the 
Victorian Age and the Long-winded Immaculate 
who accompanied her as the Hero. 

I do not know when these two first opened their 
twin career. Whether Fenimore Cooper or Wal- 
ter Scott began them, I cannot say. But they had 
an undisputed run on two continents for half 
a century. 

This Heroine was a sylph. Her chiefest charm 



206 The Hohenzollerns in America 

lay in her physical feebleness. She was generally 
presented to us in some such words as these: 

^^Let us now introduce to our readers the fair 
Madehne of Rokewood. Slender and graceful 
and of a form so fragile that her frame scarce 
fitted to fulfil its bodily functions . . . she ap- 
peared rather as one of those ethereal beings 
of the air who might visit for a brief moment 
this terrestrial scene, than one of its earthly 
inhabitants. Her large, wondering eyes looked 
upon the beholder in childlike innocence.'' 

Sounds simple, doesn't it? One might suspect 
there was something wrong with the girl's brain. 

But Hsten to this : — 

"The mind of Madeline, elegantly formed by 
the devoted labours of the venerable Abbe, her 
tutor, was of a degree of culture rarely found in 
one so young. Though scarce eighteen summers 
had flown over her head at the time when we 
introduce her to our readers, she was intimately 
conversant with the French, ItaHan, Spanish, 
and Provencal tongues. The abundant pages of 
history, both ancient and modern, sacred and 
profane, had been opened for her by her devoted 
instructor. In music she played with exquisite 
grace and accuracy upon both the spinet and the 
harpsichord, while her voice, though lacking 



Other Impossibilities 207 

something in compass, was sweet and melodious 
to a degree." 

From such a Hst of accompHshments it is clear 
that Madeline could have matriculated, even at 
the Harvard Law School, with five minutes 
preparation. Is it any wonder that there was 
a wild rush for MadeHne? In fact, right after 
the opening description of the Heroine, there 
follows an ominous sentence such as this : — 

"It was this exquisite being whose person Lord 
Rip de Viperous, a man whose reputation had 
shamed even the most licentious court of the 
age, and had led to his banishment from the 
presence of the king, had sworn to get within his 
power." 

Personally I don't blame Lord Rip a particle; 
it must have been very rough on him to have been 
banished from the presence of the king — enough 
to inflame a man to do anything. 

With two such characters in the story, the 
scene was set and the plot and adventures fol- 
lowed as a matter of course. Lord Rip de Viper- 
ous pursued the Heroine. But at every step he 
is frustrated. He decoys Madeline to a ruined 
tower at midnight, her innocence being such and 
the gaps left in her education by the Abbe being 
so wide, that she is unaware of the danger of 



208 The Hohenzollerns in America 

ruined towers after ten thirty p.m. In fact, 
"tempted by the exquisite clarity and fuhiess 
of the moon, which magnificent orb at this season 
spread its widest effulgence over all nature, she 
accepts the invitation of her would-be-betrayer 
to gather upon the battlements of the ruined keep 
the strawberries which grew there in wild pro- 
fusion. '^ 

But at the critical moment. Lord de Viperous 
is balked. At the very instant when he is about 
to seize her in his arms, Madeline turns upon him 
and says in such icy tones, '^Titled villain that 
you are, unhand me," that the man is "cowed." 
He slinks down the ruined stairway "cowed." 
And at every later turn, at each renewed attempt, 
Madeline "cows" him in like fashion. 

Moreover while Lord de Viperous is being 
thus cowed by Madeline the Heroine, he is also 
being "dogged" by the Hero. This counterpart 
of Madeline who shared her popularity for fifty 
years can best be described as the Long-winded 
Inunaculate Hero. Entirely blameless in his 
morals, and utterly virtuous in his conduct, he 
possessed at least one means of defending him- 
self. He could make speeches. This he did on 
all occasions. With these speeches he "dogged" 
Lord de Viperous. Here is the style of them: — 



Other Impossibilities ^09 

"'My Lord/ said Markham. . . ." (inciden- 
tally let it be explained that this particular brand 
of hero was always known by his surname and 
his surname was always Markham) — "'My 
lord, the sentiments that you express and the 
demeanour which you have evinced are so greatly 
at variance with the title that you bear and the 
hneage of which you spring that no authority 
that you can exercise and no threats that you are 
able to command shall deter me from expressing 
that for which, however poor and inadequate 
my powers of speech, all these of whom and for 
what I am what I am, shall answer to it for the 
integrity of that, which, whether or not, is at 
least as it is. My lord, I have done. Or shall 
I speak more plainly still?' '' 

Is it to be wondered that after this harangue 
Lord Rip sank into a chair, a hideous convulsion 
upon his face, murmuring — "It is enough." 

But successful as they were as Hero and Hero- 
ine, Markham and MadeHne presently passed 
off the scene. Where they went to, I do not 
know. Perhaps Markham got elected in the 
legislature of Massachusetts. At any rate they 
disappeared from fiction. 

There followed in place of MadeHne, the ath- 
letic sunburned heroine with the tennis racket. 



210 The Hohenzollerns in America 

She was generally called Kate Middleton, or 
some such plain, straightforward designation. 
She wore strong walking boots and leather leg- 
gings. She ate beef steak. She shot with a rifle. 

For a while this Boots and Beef Heroine (of 
the middle nineties) made a tremendous hit. 
She chmbed crags in the Rockies. She threw 
steers in Colorado with a lariat. She came 
out strong in sea scenes and shipwrecks, and on 
sinking steamers, where she ''cowed" the trem- 
bhng stewards and "dogged" the mutinous sailors 
in the same fashion that Madeline used to "cow" 
and "dog" Lord Rip de Viperous. 

With the Boots and Beef Heroine went as 
her running mate the out-of-doors man, whose 
face had been tanned and whose muscles had 
been hardened into tempered steel in wild rides 
over the Pampas of Patagonia, and who had 
learned every art and craft of savage life by 
living among the wild Hoodoos of the Himalayas. 
This Air-and-Grass-man, as he may be called, 
is generally supposed to write the story. . . . He 
was "I" all through. And he had an irritating 
modesty in speaking of his own prowess. In- 
stead of saying straight out that he was the 
strongest and bravest man in the world, he 
implied it indirectly on every page. 



Other Impossibilities 211 

Here, for example, is a typical scene in which 
^^I" and Kate figure in a desperate adventure 
in the Rocky Mountains, pursued by Indians. 

''We are about to descend on a single cord from 
the summit of a lofty crag, our sole chance of 
escape (and a frightfully small chance at that) 
from the roving band of Apaches. 

''With my eye I measured the fearsome descent 
below us. 

" 'Hold fast to the line, Miss Middleton,' I said 
as I set my foot against a projecting rock. 
(Please note that the Air-and- Grass Hero in these 
stories always calls the Heroine Miss Middleton 
right up to the very end.) 

"The noble girl seized the knotted end of the 
buckskin line. 'All right, Mr. Smith,' she said 
with quiet confidence. 

"I braced myself for the effort. My muscles 
like tempered steel responded to the strain. I 
lowered a hundred fathoms of the line. I could 
already hear the voice of Kate far down the cliff. 

"Don't let go the line. Miss Middleton,' I 
called. (Here was an excellent piece of advice.) 

"The girl's clear voice floated up to me . . . 
'All right, Mr. Smith,' she caUed, 'I won't.'" 

Of course they landed safely at the foot of the 
cliff, after the manner of all heroes and heroines. 



212 The Hohenzollerns in America 

And here it is that Kate in her turn comes out 
strong, at the evening encampment, frying bacon 
over a blazing fire of pine branches, while the 
fireHght illuminates her leather leggings and her 
rough but picturesque costume. 

The circumstances might seem a Httle daring 
and improper. But the reader knows that it is 
all right, because the hero and heroine always 
call one another Miss Middleton and Mr. Smith. 

Not till right at the end, when they are just 
getting back again to the confines of ci\dHzation, 
do they depart from this. 

Here is the scene that happens. . . . The 
hero and heroine are on the platform of the way- 
side depot where they are to part . . . Kate to return 
to the luxurious home of her aunt, Mrs. van der 
Kyper of New York, and the Air-and-Grass Man 
to start for the pampas of Patagonia to hunt the 
hoopoo. The Air-and-Grass Man is about to 
say goodbye. Then . . . "'Kate,' I said, as I 
held the noble girl's gloved hand in mine a mo- 
ment. She looked me in the face with the full, 
frank, fearless gaze of a sister. 

"'Yes?' she answered. 

"'Kate,' I repeated, 'do you know what I was 
Jthinking of when I held the Kne while you were 
half way down the cHff?' 



Other Impossibilities 213 

"*No/ she murmured, while a flush suffused 
her cheek. 

"^I was thinkmg, Kate/ I said, *that if the 
rope broke I should be very sorry.' 

"* Edward!' she exclaimed. 

"I clasped her in my arms. 

"^ Shall I make a confession,' said Kate, look- 
ing up timidly, half an hour later, as I tenderly 
unclasped the noble girl from my encircUng 
arms, ... 'I was thinking the same thing too.'" 

So Kate and Edward had their day and then, 
as Tennyson says, they "passed," or as less 
cultivated people put it, "they were passed up 
in the air." 

As the years went by they failed to please. 
Kate was a great improvement upon MadeHne. 
But she wouldn't do. The truth was, if one may 
state it openly, Kate wasn't tough enough. In 
fact she wasn't tough at all. She turned out to 
be in reahty just as proper and just as virtuous 
as MadeHne. 

So, too, with the Air-and-Grass Hero. For all 
of his tempered muscles and his lariat and his 
Winchester rifle, he was presently exposed as a 
fraud. He was just as Long-winded and just as 
Immaculate as the Victorian Hero that he dis- 
placed. 



214 The Hohenzollerns in America 



What the pubHc really wants and has always 
wanted in its books is wickedness. Fiction was 
recognised in its infancy as being a work of the 
devil. 

So the popular novel, despairing of real wicked- 
ness among the cannibals, and in the ruined tower 
at midnight, and on the open-air of the prairies, 
shifted its scenes again. It came indoors. It 
came back to the city. And it gave us the new 
crop of heroes and heroines and the scenes and 
settings with which the fiction of to-day has re- 
placed the Heroes and Heroines of Yesterday. 
The Lure of the City is its theme. It pursues 
its course to the music of the ukalele, in the 
strident racket of the midnight cabaret. Here 
move the Harvard graduate in his dinner jacket, 
drunk at one in the morning. Here is the hard 
face of Big Business scowling at its desk; and 
here the ghttering Heroine of the hour in her dress 
of shimmering sequins, making such tepid crea- 
tures as Madeline and Kate look like the small 
change out of a twenty-five cent shinplaster. 



3. — The Discovery of America; 

Being Done into Moving Pictures and Out Again 



NO greater power for education/' said 
President Shurman the other day, ^^has 
come among us during the last forty 
years than the moving picture." 

I am not certain that it was President Shurman. 
And he may not have said it the other day. Nor 
do I feel absolutely sure that he referred to the 
last forty years. Indeed now that I come to 
think of it, I don't beheve it was Shurman. In 
fact it may have been ex-President Ehot. Or 
was it, perhaps, President Hadley of Yale? Or 
did I say it myself? Judging by the accuracy 
and force of the language, I think I must have. 
I doubt if Shurman or Hadley could have put it 
quite so neatly. There's a touch about it that I 
recognise. 

But let that pass. At any rate it is something 
that everybody is saying and thinking. AU our 
educators have turned their brains towards the 
possibility of utilising moving pictures for the 
purpose of education. It is being freely said 

215 



216 The Hohenzollerns in America 

that history and geography, and even arithmetic, 
instead of being taught by the slow and painful 
process of books and memory, can be imparted 
through the eye. 

I had no sooner heard of this idea than I be- 
came impassioned to put it into practice. I have 
therefore prepared, or am preparing, a film, 
especially designed for the elementary classes of 
our schools to narrate the story of the discovery 
of America. 

This I should like the reader to sit and see with 
me, in the eye of his imagination. But let me 
first give the plain, unvarnished account of the 
discovery of America as I took it from one of our 
school histories. 

^^Christopher Columbus , otherwise Christoforo 
Colombo, the celebrated discoverer of America, was 
born of poor but honest parents in the Italian city 
of Genoa, His mother, Teresa Colombo, seems to 
have been a woman of great piety and intelligence. 
Of his father, Bartolomeo Colombo, nothing is 
recorded. From his earliest youth the boy Chris- 
topher developed a passion for mathematics, as- 
tronomy, geodesy, and the other sciences of th6 
day. ..." 

But, no, — stop! I am going too fast. The 
reader will get it better if we turn it into pictures 



Other Impossibilities 217 

bit by bit as we go on. Let the reader therefore 
imagine himself seated before the curtain in the 
lighted theatre. All ready? Very good. Let 
the music begin — Star Spangled Banner, please 
— flip off the lights. Now then. 



DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 

AUTHORIZED 

BY THE BOARD OF CENSORS OF 

NEW YORK STATE 



There we are. That gives the child the correct 
historical background right away. Now what 
goes on next? Let me see. Ah, yes, of course. 
We throw an announcement on the screen, thus. 



CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. . Mr.Quinn 



Here the face of Mr. Quinn (in a bowler hat) is 
thrown on the screen and fades out again. 
We foUow him up with 



SPIRIT OF AMERICA. . Miss E. Dickenson 



Now, we are ready to begin in earnest. Let us 
make the scenario together. First idea to be 
expressed: 



218 The Hohenzollerns in America 

Christopher Columbus was the son of poor hut 
honest parents. 

This might seem difficult to a beginner, but to 
those of us who frequent the movies it is nothing. 

The reel spins and we see — a narrow room — 
(it is always narrow in the movies) — to indicate 
straitened circumstances — cardboard furniture 

— high chairs with carved backs — two cardboard 
beams across the ceihng (all this means the 
Middle Ages) — a long dinner table — all the 
little Columbuses seated at it — Teresa Colombo 
cutting bread at one end of it — gives a sHce to 
each, one shce (that means poverty in the movies) 

— Teresa rolls her eyes up — all the httle children 
put their hands together and say grace (this 
registers honesty). The thing is done. Let us 
turn back to the history book and see what is 
to be put in next. 

*^ . . . The father of Christopher ^ Bartolomeo 
Colombo, was a man of no especial talent of whom 
nothing is recorded.^' 

That's easy. First we announce him on the 
screen : 



BARTOLOMEO COLOMBO. .Mr. Henderson 



Then we stick him on the film on a corner of the 
room, leaning up against the cardboard clock 



Other Impossibilities 219 

and looking at the children. This attitude in 
the movies always indicates a secondary character 
of no importance. His business is to look at the 
others and to indicate forgetfulness of self, in- 
competence, unimportance, vacuity, simpUcity. 
Note how this differs from the attitudes of im- 
portant characters. If a movie character — 
one of importance — is plotting or scheming, he 
seats himself at a Httle round table, drums on it 
with his fingers, and half closes one eye. If he is 
being talked to, or having a letter or document 
or telegram read to him, he stands "facing fuU'^ 
and working his features up and down to indicate 
emotion sweeping over them. If he is being 
"exposed" (which is done by pointing fingers at 
him), he hunches up like a snake in an angle of 
the room with both eyes half shut and his mouth 
set as if he had just eaten a lemon. But if he has 
none of these things to express and is only in the 
scene as a background for the others, then he 
goes over and leans in an easy attitude against 
the tall cardboard clock. 

That then is the place for Bartolomeo Colombo. 
To the clock with him. 

Now what comes next? 

"... The young Christopher developed at an 
early age a passion for study, and especially for 



220 The Hohenzollerns in America 

astronomy, geometry, geodesy, and the exact science 
of the day J' 

Quite easy. On spins the film. Young Chris- 
topher in a garret room (all movie study is done 
in garrets). The cardboard ceihng slopes within 
six inches of his head. This shows that the boy 
never rises from his books. He can't. On a 
table in front of hun is a little globe and a pair 
of compasses. Christopher spins the globe round. 
Then he makes two circles with the compasses, 
one after the other, very carefully. This is the 
recognised movie symbol for mathematical 
research. 

So there we have Christopher — poor, honest, 
studious, full of circles. 

Now to the book again. 

"... The young Columbus received his educa- 
tion at the monastery of the Franciscan monks at 
Genoa. Here he spent seven years.'' 

Yes, but we can put that on the screen in seven 
seconds. 

Turn on the film. 

Movie Monastery — exterior, done in grey 
cardboard — ding, dong, ding, dong (man in the 
orchestra with triangle and stick) — procession of 
movie friars — faces more like thugs, but never 
mind — they are friars because they walk two 



Other Impossibilities 221 

and two in a procession, singing out of hymn 
books. 

Now for the book again. 

"... Fra Giacomo, the prior of the monastery, 
delighted with the boy's progress, encourages his 
studies J^ 

Wait a minute. 



FRA GIACOMO Mr . Edward Sims 



Mr. Sims's face, clean-shaved under a round hat, 
fades in and out. Then the picture goes on. 
Movie monastery interior — young Christopher, 
still at a table with compasses — benevolent friar 
bending over him — Christopher turns the com- 
passes and looks up with a what-do-you-know- 
about-that look — astonishment and deHght of 
friar (registered by opening his eyes like a bull 
frog). All this shows study, progress, appHcation. 
The friars are delighted with the boy. 

"... Christopher, after seven years of study, 
reaches the firm conviction that the world is round J ^ 

Picture. Christopher — with his globe — 
jumps up from table — passes his fingers round 
and round the globe — registers the joy of inven- 
tion — seats himself at table and draws circles 
with his compasses furiously. He fades out. 



2!£2 Tlie IlohenzoUerns in America 

"... Fired unth Jiis discovery Christopher 
sets otitfratn the nianustery.'' 

Stop a minute, this is a little hard. Fired. 
How ciui we show Christopher ''fired." We 
can't. Perhaps he'll be fired if the fihn is no 
good, but we must omit it just now. 

''Hesetsaut:' 

One second only for this. !Monaster>' door 
(double cardboard with iron across it) — Christo- 
pher leaving — carries a wallet to mean distance. 
Fra Giacomo blessing him — fade out. 

"... Far eighteen years Columbus vainly 
travelled through the world on foot ojjering his 
diseovery at the courts of Europe^ in vain, though 
asking nothing in return for it except a feet of 
ships, tico hundred men and provisions for two 
years.'' 

To anybody not used to scenarios this looks a 
large order. Eighteen years seems dilhcult to 
put on the screen. In reality this is exactly 
where the trained movie man sees his chance. 
Here he can put in anything and eve ny' thing that 
he likes, bringing in, in a slightly mediaeval form, 
all his favourite movie scenes. 

Thus, for example, here we have first the good 
old midnight cabaret supper scene — thinly dis- 
guised as the court of the King of Sardinia. To 



Other Impossibilities 223 

turn a cabaret into a court the movie men merely- 
exchange their Fifth Avenue evening dress for 
short coats and knee breeches, heavily wadded 
and quilted, and wear large wigs. Quilted pants 
and wigs register courtiers, the courtiers of any- 
body — Charlemagne, Queen Elizabeth, Peter 
the Great, Louis Quatorze, anybody and every- 
body who ever had courtiers. Just as men with 
bare legs mean Romans, men in pea-jackets mean 
detectives, and young men drunk in evening dress 
Harvard graduates. 

The ladies at the court of Sardinia wear huge 
paper frills round their necks. Otherwise it is 
the cabaret scene with the familiar little tables, 
and the ukaleles going like mad in one comer, 
and black sarsaparilla being poured foaming into 
the glasses. 

In this scene Columbus moves up and down, 
twirling his little globe and looking appealingly 
in their faces. All laugh at him. His part is 
just the same as that of the poor little girl 
trying to sell up-state violets in the midnight 
cabaret. 

The Court of Sardinia fades and the film shows 
Columbus vainly soliciting financial aid from 
Lorenzo the Magnificent. 

Stop one minute, please. 



224 The Hohenzollerns in America 



LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT .... 

Mr. L. Evans 



This scene again is old and familiar. It is the 
well-known interior representing the Grinding 
CapitaUst, or the Bitter Banker refusing aid to 
the boy genius who has invented a patent pea- 
rake. The only change is that Lorenzo wears a 
huge wig, has no telephone, and handles a large 
quill pen (to register Middle Ages) which he 
wiggles furiously up and down on a piece of 
parchment. 

So the eighteen years, with scenes of this sort, 
turn out the easiest part of the whole show. 

But let us to the book again. 

"... After eighteen years Columbus, now 
past the prime of life, is presented at the Court of 
Queen Isabella of Spain.^^ 

Just half a moment. 



QUEEN ISABELLA . Miss Janet Briggs 



There will be very probably at this point a slight 
applause from the back of the hall. Miss Briggs 
was here last week, or her astral body was — as 
Maggie of the Cattle Ranges. The impression 
that she made is passed on to Isabella. 



Other Impossibilities 225 

" The Queen and her consort, King Ferdinand of 
Aragon. , ." 

Stop, stick him on the film. 



FERDINAND OF ARAGON . Mr, Edward Giles 



(Large wig, flat velvet cap and square whiskers — 
same make-up as for Ferdinand of Bulgaria, 
Ferdinand of Bohemia, or any of the Ferdinands.) 
"... were immediately seized with enthusiasm 
for the marvellous discovery of the Genoese ad- 



venturer ^ 



Picture. Columbus hands his globe to Isabella 
and his compasses to Ferdinand. They register 
dehght and astonishment. The Queen turns the 
globe round and round and holds it up to Ferdi- 
nand. Both indicate with their faces, well- 
what-do-you-know-about-this. Ferdinand makes 
a circle with the compasses on a table — the 
courtiers, fickle creatures, crowd around. They 
are stiU dressed as in Sardinia eighteen years ago. 
In fact, one recognises quite a lot of them. When 
Ferdinand draws the circle they fall back in wild 
astonishment, gesticulating frantically. What 
they mean is, "It's a circle, it's a circle." 

^^The King and Queen at once place three ships 
at the disposal of Columbus.''^ 



226 The Hohenzollerns in America 

On with the picture. The harbour of the port 
of Palos — ships bobbing up and down (it is 
really the oyster boats in Baltimore Bay but it 
looks just like Palos, or near enough). Notice 
Queen Isabella on the right, at the top of a flight 
of steps, extending her hand and looking at 
Columbus. Her gesture means, "Pick a ship, 
any ship you like, any colour.'^ Just as if she 
were saying, "Pick a card, any card you like.'^ 

We turn again to the history. 

"... Christopher Columbus, now arrived at the 
height of his desire, sets out upon his memorable 
voyage accompafiied by a hundred companions in 
three caravels, the Pinta, the Nina and tJie Espiritu 
Santor 

Ah, here we have the movie work — the real 
thing. Cardboard caravel tossing on black water 
— seen first right close to us — we are almost on 
board of it. Notice the movie sailors with black 
whiskers and bare feet (bare feet in the movies 
always means a sailor, and black whiskers mean 
Spaniards). Now we see the caravel a little way 
out — whoop ! How she bobs up and down 1 
They give her that jolt (it's done with the machine 
itself) to mean danger. There are all three 
caravels — Hoop — er — oo! See them go up and 
down — stormy night coming all right. See the 



Other Impossibilities 227 

sun setting in the west, over the water? They're 
heading straight for it. Good-night Columbus — 
take care of yourself out there in the blackness. 

^^ During the voyage Columbus remained con- 
tinually on deck. Sleeping at the prow, his face 
towards the new world, he saw already in his dreams 
the accomplishment of his hopes ^ 

On goes the picture. Christopher in the prow 
of the caravel (in the movies a prow is made by 
putting two little board fences together and 
propping up a bowsprit lengthwise over them). 
Columbus sits up, peers intently into the darkness, 
his hand to his brow — registers a look. Do I 
see America? No. Lies down, shuts his eyes and 
falls into an instantaneous movie sleep. His face 
fades out slowly to music, which means that he is 
going to dream. Then on the screen the an- 
nouncement is shown : 



SPIRIT OF AMERICA . . . 

Miss E. Dickenson 



and here we have Miss Dickenson floating in the 
air above Columbus. She wears nothing except 
mosquito netting, but she has got on enough of it 
to get past the censor of the State of New York. 
Just enough, apparently 



228 The Hohenzollerns in America 

Miss E. Dickenson is joined by a whole troop 
of Miss Dickensons all in white mosquito netting. 
They go through a series of beautiful evolutions, 
floating over the sleeping figure of Columbus. 
The dance they do is meant to typify, or rather to 
signify, — as a matter of fact we needn't worry 
much about what it signified. It is an allegory, 
done in white mosquito netting. That is gen- 
erally held to be quite enough. Let us go back 
to the book — 

^^ After a storm-tossed voyage of three months ..." 

Wait a bit. Turn on the picture again and 
toss the caravels up and down. 

"... during which the food supply threatened 
to fail. . ." 

Put that on the screen, please. Colimibus sur- 
rounded by ten sailors, dividing up a potato. 

". . . the caravels arrived in safety at the beau- 
tiful island of San Salvador. Columbus, bearing 
the banner of Spain, stepped first ashore. Sur- 
rounded by a wondering crowd of savages he 
prostrated himself upon the beach and kissed the 
soil of the New World that he had discovered.^ ^ 

All this is so easy that it's too easy. It runs 
into pictures of itself. Anybody, accustomed to 
the movies, can see Columbus with his banner and 
the movie savages hopping up and down around 



Other Impossibilities 229 

him. Movie savages are gay, gladsome creatures 
anyway, and hopping up and down is their chief 
mode of expressing themselves. Add to them a 
sandy beach, with palm trees waving visibly in 
the wind (it is always windy in the movies) and 
the thing is done. 

Just one further picture is needed to complete 
the film. 

^^ Columbus who returned to Europe to lay at the 
feet of the Spanish sovereigns the world he had 
discovered, fell presently under the disfavour of the 
court, and died in poverty and obscurity, a victim 
of the ingratitude of princes ^ 

Last picture. Columbus dying under the poig- 
nant circumstances known only in the movies — 
a garret room — ceiling lower than ever — a 
truckle bed, narrow enough to kill him if all else 
failed — Teresa Colombo his aged mother alone 
at his bedside — she offers him medicine in a 
long spoon — (this shows, if nothing else would, 
that the man is ill) — he shakes his head — puts 
out his hand and rests it on the Httle globe — 
reaches feebly for his compasses — can't manage 
it — rolls up his eyes and fades. 

The music plays softly and the inexorable film, 
like the reel of life itself, spins on, announcing 



230 Other Impossibilities 



At this theatre 

All next week 

MAGGIE MAY 

and 

WALTER CURRAN 

in 

IS IT WORTH IT 



And after that I can imagine the audience dispers- 
ing, and the now educated children going off to 
their homes and one saying as he enters — 

"Gee, I seen a great picture show at school 
to-day." 

"Yes?" says his mother, "and what was 
it?" 

"Oh, it was all about a gink that went round 
the cabarets trying to sell an invention what he'd 
got but nobody wouldn't look at it till at last one 
dame gave him three oyster boats, see? and so he 
and a lot of other guys loaded them up and hiked 
off across the ocean." 

"And where did he go to?" 

"Africa. And he and the other guys had a 
great stand in with the niggers and he'd have 
sold his invention all right but one old dame got 



The Hohenzollerns in America 231 

him alone in a hut and poisoned him and took 
it off him.'' 

That, I think, is about the way the film would 
run. When it is finished I must get President 
Shurman, or whoever it was, to come and see it. 



4. — Politics from Within 



TO avoid all error as to the point of view, 
let me say in commencing that I am a 
Liberal Conservative, or, if you will, a 
Conservative Liberal with a strong dash of sym- 
pathy with the Socialist idea, a friend of Labour, 
and a behever in Progressive RadicaHsm. I do 
not desire office but would take a seat in the 
Canadian Senate at five minutes notice. 

I believe there are ever so many people of 
exactly this way of thinking. 

Let me say further than in writing of "politics" 
I am only deaHng with the lights and shadows 
that flicker over the surface, and am not trying 
to discuss, still less to decry, the deep and vital 
issues that He below. 

Yet I will say that vital though the issues may 
be below the surface, there is more clap-trap, 
insincerity and humbug on the surface of politics 
than over any equal area on the face of any 
institution. 

The candidate, as such, is a humbug. The 
voters, as voters — not as fathers, brothers or 

232 



Other Impossibilities 233 

sons — are humbugs. The committees are hum- 
bugs. And the speeches to the extent of about 
ninety per cent are pure buncombe. But, oddly 
enough, out of the silly babel of talk that accom- 
panies popular government, we get, after all, 
pretty good government — infinitely better than 
the government of an autocratic king. Between 
democracy and despotic kingship lies all the 
difference between genial humbug and black 
sin. 

For the candidate for popular ofl&ce I have 
nothing but sympathy and sorrow. It has been 
my fortune to walk round at the heels of half a 
dozen of them in different little Canadian towns, 
watching the candidate try in vain to brighten 
up his face at the glad sight of a party voter. 

One, in particular, I remember. Nature had 
meant him to be a sour man, a hard man, a man 
with but httle joy in the company of his fellows. 
Fate had made him a candidate for the House of 
Commons. So he was doing his best to behe his 
nature. 

"Hullo, William!'^ he would call out as a man 
passed driving a horse and buggy, "got the little 
sorrel out for a spin, eh?" 

Then he would turn to me and say in a low 
rasping voice — 



234 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"There goes about the biggest skunk in this 
whole constituency." 

A few minutes later he would wave his hand 
over a httle hedge in friendly salutation to a 
man working in a garden. 

"Hullo, Jasper! That^s a fine lot of corn 
you've got there." 

Jasper rephed in a growl. And when we were 
well past the house the candidate would say 
between his teeth — 

"That's about the meanest whelp in the riding." 

Our conversation all down the street was of 
that pattern. 

" Good morning, Edward! Giving the potatoes 
a dose of Paris green, eh?" 

And in an undertone — 

"I wish to Heaven he'd take a dose of it him- 
self." 

And so on from house to house. 

I counted up, from one end of the street to the 
other, that there were living in it seven skunks, 
fourteen low whelps, eight mean hounds and 
two dirty skinflints. And all of these merely 
among the Conservative voters. It made me 
wish to be a Liberal. Especially as the Liberal 
voters, by the law of the perversity of human 
affairs, always seemed to be the finer lot. As 



Other Impossibilities 235 

they were not voting for our candidate, they were 
able to meet him in a fair and friendly way, 
whereas WiUiam and Jasper and Edward and 
our "bunch'' were always surly and hardly 
deigned to give more than a growl in answer to 
the candidate's greeting, without even looking 
up at him. 

But a Liberal voter would stop him in the 
street and shake hands and say in a frank, cordial 
way. 

"Mr. Grouch, I'm sorry indeed that I can't 
vote for you, and I'd Hke to be able to wish you 
success, but of course you know I'm on the other 
side and always have been and can't change 
now." 

Whereupon the Candidate would say. "That's 
all right, John, I don't expect you to. I can 
respect a man's convictions all right, I guess." 

So they would part excellent friends, the 
Candidate saying as we moved off : 

"That man, John Winter, is one of the straight- 
est men in this whole county." 

Then he would add — 

"Now we'll just go into this house for a minute. 
There's a dirty pup in here that's one of our 
supporters." 

My opinion of our own supporters went lower 



236 The Hohenzollerns in America 

every day, and my opinion of the Liberal voters 
higher, till it so happened that I went one day 
to an old friend of mine who was working on the 
Liberal side. I asked him how he liked it. 

"Oh, well enough!" he said, "as a sort of game. 
But in this constituency you've got all the decent 
voters; our voters are the lowest bimch of skunks 
I ever struck.'' 

Just then a man passed in a buggy, and looked 
sourly at my friend the Liberal worker. 

"Hullo, John!" he called, with a manufactured 
hilarity, "got the Httle mare out for a turn, eh?" 

John gnmted. 

"There's one of them," said my friend, "the 
lowest pup in this county, John Winter." 

"Come along," said the Candidate to me one 
morning, "I want you to meet my committee." 

"You'll find them," he said confidingly, as we 
started down the street towards the committee 
rooms, "an awful bunch of mutts." 

"Too bad," I said, "what's wrong with them?" 

"Oh, I don't know — they're just a pack of 
simps. They don't seem to have any punch in 
them. The one you'll meet first is the chairman 
— he's about the worst dub of the lot; I never 
saw a man with so Httle force in my Hfe. He's 



Other Impossibilities 237 

got no magnetism, that's what's wrong with him 
— no magnetism.'' 

A few minutes later the Candidate was intro- 
ducing me to a roomful of heavy looking Com- 
mittee men. Committee men in poHtics, I notice, 
have always a heavy bovine look. They are 
generally in a sort of daze, or doped from smoking 
free cigars. 

"Now I want to introduce you first," said the 
Candidate, "to our chairman, Mr. Frog. Mr. 
Frog is our old battle horse in this constituency. 
And this is our campaign secretary Mr. Bughouse, 
and Mr. Dope, and Mr. Mudd, et cetera." 

Those may not have been their names. 

It is merely what the names sounded like when 
one was looking into their faces. 

The Candidate introduced them all as battle 
horses, battle axes, battle leaders, standard 
bearers, flag-holders, and so forth. If he had 
introduced them as hat-racks or cigar holders, 
it would have been nearer the mark. 

Presently the Candidate went out and I was 
left with the battle-axes. 

"What do you think of our chances?" I 
asked. 

The battle-axes shook their heads with dubious 
looks. 



238 The Hohenzollerns in America 

"Pretty raw deal," said the Chairman, "the 
Convention wishing him on us." He pointed 
with his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the 
departed Candidate. 

"What's wrong with him?" I asked. 

Mr. Frog shook his head again. 

"No punch/' he said. 

"None at all," agreed all the battle horses. 

"I'll tell you," said the Campaign secretary, 
Mr. Bughouse, a voluble man, with wandering eyes 
— "the trouble is he has no magnetism, no 
personal magnetism." 

"I see," I said. 

"Now, you take this man, Shortis, that the 
Liberals have got hold of," continued Mr. Bug- 
house, " he's full of magnetism. He appeals." 

All the other Committee men nodded. 

"That's so," they murmured, "magnetism, 
Our man hasn't a darned ounce of it." 

"I met Shortis the other night in the street," 
went on Mr. Bughouse, "and he said, 'Come on 
up to my room in the hotel.' 'Oh,' I said, *I 
can't very well.' 'Nonsense,' he said, 'You're 
on the other side but what does that matter?' 
Well, we went up to his room, and there he had 
whiskey, and gin, and lager, — everything. 
'Now,' he says, 'name your drink — what is it?' 



Other Impossibilities 239 

There he was, right in his room, breaking the 
law without caring a darn about it. Well, 
you know the voters like that kind of thing. It 
appeals to them.'' 

"Well," said another of the Committee men, 
— I think it was the one called Mr. Dope, "I 
wouldn't mind that so much. But the chief 
trouble about our man, to my mind, is that he 
can't speak." 

"He can't?" I exclaimed. 

All the Committee shook their heads. 

"Not for sour apples!" asserted Mr. Dope 
positively. "Now, in this riding that won't do. 
Our people here are used to first class speaking, 
they expect it. I suppose there has been better 
speaking in this Constituency than anywhere 
else in the whole dominion. Not lately, perhaps; 
not in the last few elections. But I can remem- 
ber, and so can some of the boys here, the election 
when Sir John A. spoke here, when the old Mac- 
kenzie government went out." 

He looked around at the circle. Several nodded. 

"Remember it as well," assented Mr. Mudd, 
"as if it were yesterday." 

"Well, sir," contmued Mr. Dope, "I'll never 
forget Sir John A. speaking here in the Odd 
FeUows' HaU, eh?" 



240 The Hohenzollerns in America 

The Committee men nodded and gurgled in 
corroboration. 

"My! but he was plastered. We had him over 
at Pete Robinson's hotel all afternoon, and I 
teU you he was plastered for fair. We all were. 
I remember I was so pickled myself I could 
hardly help Sir John up the steps of the platform. 
So were you, Mudd, do you remember?'' 

"I certainly was!" said Mr. Mudd proudly. 
Committee men who would scorn to drink lager 
beer in 191 9, take a great pride, I have observed, 
in having been pickled in 1878. 

"Yes, sir," continued Mr. Dope, "you cer- 
tainly were pickled. I remember just as well as 
anything, when they opened the doors and let 
the crowd in: all the boys had been bowling up 
and were pretty weU soused. You never saw 
such a crowd. Old Dr. Greenway (boys, you 
remember the old Doc) was in the chair, and he was 
pretty well spifflocated. Well, sir. Sir John A. 
got up in that hall and he made the finest, most 
moving speech I ever listened to. Do you 
remember when he called old Trelawney an ash- 
barrel? And when he made that appeal for a 
union of hearts and said that the sight of McGuire 
(the Liberal candidate) made him sick? I tell 
you those were great days. You don't get speak- 



Other Impossibilities 241 

ing like that now; and you don't get audiences 
like that now either. Not the same cahbre." 

All the Committee shook their heads. 

"Well, anyway, boys," said the Chairman, as 
he Hghted a fresh cigar, "to-morrow will decide, 
one way or the other. WeVe certainly worked 
hard enough," — here he passed the box of 
cigars round to the others — "I haven't been 
in bed before two any night since the work 
started." 

"Neither have I," said another of the workers. 
"I was just saying to the wife when I got up this 
morning that I begin to feel as if I never wanted 
to see the sight of a card again." 

"Well, I don't regret the work," said the 
Secretary, "so long as we carry the riding. You 
see," he added in explanation to me, "we're up 
against a pretty hard proposition here. This 
riding really is Liberal: they've got the majority 
of voters though we have once or twice swung it 
Conservative. But whether we can carry it 
with a man like Grouch is hard to say. One 
thing is certain, boys, if he does carry it, he doesn't 
owe it to himself," 

All the battle horses agreed on this. 

A Httle after that we dispersed. 

And twenty-four hours later the vote was taken 



242 The Hohenzollerns in America 

and to my intense surprise the riding was carried 
by Grouch the Conservative candidate. 

I say, to my surprise. But apparently not to 
anybody else. 

For it appeared this (was in conversations after 
the election) that Grouch was a man of extra- 
ordinary magnetism. He had, so they said, 
*' punch." Shortis, the Liberal, it seemed, lacked 
punch absolutely. Even his own supporters 
admitted that he had no personality whatever. 
Some wondered how he had the nerve to run. 

But my own theory of how the election was 
carried is quite different. 

I feel certain that all the Conservative voters 
despised their candidate so much that they 
voted Liberal. And all the Liberals voted Con- 
servative. 

That carried the riding. 

Meantime Grouch left the constituency by 
the first train next day for Ottawa. Except for 
paying taxes on his house, he will not be back in 
the town till they dissolve parHament again. 



5. — The Lost Illusions of Mr. Sims 



IN the club to which I belong, in a quiet comer 
where the sunlight falls in sideways, there 
may be seen sitting of an afternoon my good 
friend of thirty years' standing, Mr. Edward 
Sims. Being somewhat affiicted with gout, he 
generally sits with one foot up on a chair. On a 
brass table beside him are such things as Mr. Sims 
needs. But they are few. Wealthy as he is, 
the needs of Mr. Sims reach scarcely further 
than Martini cocktails and Egyptian cigarettes. 
Such poor comforts as these, brought by a defer- 
ential waiter, with, let us say, a folded newspaper 
at five o'clock, suffice for all his wants. Here 
sits Mr. Sims till the shadows fall in the street 
outside, when a limousine motor trundles up to 
the club and rolls him home. 

And here of an afternoon Mr. Sims talks to me 
of his college days when he was young. The 
last thirty years of his Hfe have moved in so 
gentle a current upon so smooth a surface that 
they have been without adventure. It is the 
stormy period of his youth that preoccupies my 

243 



244 The Hohenzollerns in America 

friend as he sits looking from the window of the 
club at the waving leaves in the summer time 
and the driving snow in the winter. 

I am of that habit of mind that makes me prone 
to Hsten. And for this, perhaps, Mr. Sims selects 
me as the recipient of the stories of his college 
days. It is, it seems, the fixed behef of my good 
friend that when he was young he belonged at 
college to a particularly nefarious crowd or group 
that exists in his mind under the name of the 
"old gang." The same association, or corporate 
body or whatever it should be called, is also 
designated by Mr. Sims, the "old crowd," or 
more simply and affectionately "the boys." In 
the recollection of my good friend this "old gang" 
were of a devilishness since lost off the earth. 
Work they wouldn't. Sleep they despised. 
While indoors they played poker in a blue haze 
of tobacco smoke with beer in jugs and mugs all 
round them. All night they were out of doors on 
the sidewalk with linked arms, singing songs in 
chorus and jeering at the city pohce. 

Yet in spite of Hfe such as this, which might 
appear to an outsider wearing to the intellect, 
the "old gang" as recollected by Mr. Sims were 
of a mental brilliancy that eclipses everything 
previous or subsequent. McGregor of the Class 



Other Impossibilities 245 

of '85 graduated with a gold medal in Philosophy 
after drinking twelve bottles of lager before sit- 
ting down to his final examination. Ned Purvis, 
the football half-back, went straight from the foot- 
ball field after a hard game with his ankle out of 
joint, drank half a bottle of Bourbon Rye and 
then wrote an examination in Greek poetry that 
drew tears from the President of the college. 

Mr. Sims is perhaps all the more prone to talk 
of these early days insomuch that, since his youth, 
life, in the mere material sense, has used him all 
too kindly. At an early age, indeed at about 
the very time of his graduation, Mr. Sims came 
into money, — not money in the large and 
frenzied sense of a speculative fortime, begetting 
care and breeding anxiety, but in the warm and 
comfortable inheritance of a family brewery, 
about as old and as well-established as the Con- 
stitution of the United States. In this brewery, 
even to-day, Mr. Sims, I beheve, spends a certain 
part, though no great part, of his time. He is 
carried to it, I understand, in his limousine in 
the sunnier hours of the morning; for an hour or 
so each day he moves about among the warm 
smell of the barley and the quiet hum of the 
machinery murmuring among its dust. 

There is, too, somewhere in the upper part of 



246 The Hohenzollerns in America 

the city a huge, silent residence, where a noiseless 
butler adjusts Mr. Sims's leg on a chair and serves 
him his dinner in isolated luxury. 

But the residence, and the brewery, and with 
them the current of Mr. Sims's Hfe move of 
themselves. 

Thus has care passed Mr. Sims by, leaving him 
stranded in a club chair with his heavy foot and 
stick beside him. 

Mr. Sims is a bachelor. Nor is he likely now 
to marry: but this through no lack of veneration 
or respect for the sex. It arises, apparently, 
from the fact that when Mr. Sims was young, 
during his college days, the beauty and charm of 
the girls who dwelt in his college town was such 
as to render all later women mere feeble sugges- 
tions of what might have been. There was, as 
there always is, one girl in particular. I have 
not heard my friend speak much of her. But I 
gather that Kate Dashaway was the kind of girl 
who might have made a fit mate even for the 
sort of intellectual giant that flourished at Mr. 
Sims's college. She was not only beautiful. All 
the girls remembered by Mr. Sims were ' that. 
But she was in addition "a good head" and "a 
good sport," two of the highest quahties that, in 
Mr. Sims's view, can crown the female sex. She 



Other Impossibilities 247 

had, he said, no "nonsense" about her, by which 
term Mr. Sims indicated religion. She drank 
lager beer, played tennis as well as any man in 
the college, and smoked cigarettes a whole genera- 
tion in advance of the age. 

Mr. Sims, so I gather, never proposed to her, 
nor came within a measurable distance of doing 
so. A man so prone, as is my friend, to spend 
his time in modest admiration of the prowess of 
others is apt to lag behind. Miss Dashaway 
remains to Mr. Sims, as all else does, a retrospect 
and a regret. 

But the chief peculiarities of the old gang — 
as they exist in the mind of Mr. Sims — is the 
awful fate that has overwhelmed them. It is not 
merely that they are scattered to the four comers 
of the continent. That might have been ex- 
pected. But, apparently, the most awful moral 
ruin has fallen upon them. That, at least, is the 
abiding belief of Mr. Sims. 

"Do you ever hear anything of McGregor 
now?" I ask him sometimes. 

"No," he says, shaking his head quietly. "I 
understand he went all to the devil." 

"How was that?" 

"Booze," says Mr. Sims. There is a quiet 
finality about the word that ends all discussion. 



248 The Hohenzollerns in America 

, "Poor old Curly!" says Mr. Sims, in speaking 
of another of his classmates. "I guess he's 
pretty well down and out these days." 

"What's the trouble?" I say. 

Mr. Sims moves his eyes sideways as he sits. 
It is easier than moving his head. 

"Booze," he says. 

Even apparent success in life does not save 
Mr. Sims's friends. 

"I see," I said one day, "that they have just 
made Arthur Stewart a Chief Justice out west." 

"Poor old Artie," murmured Mr. Sims. "He'll 
have a hard time holding it down. I imagine 
he's pretty well tanked up all the time these 
days." 

When Mr. Sims has not heard of any of his 
associates for a certain lapse of years, he decides 
to himself that they are down and out. It is a 
form of writing them off. There is a melancholy 
satisfaction in it. As the years go by Mr. Sims is 
coming to regard himself and a few others as the 
lonely survivors of a great flood. All the rest, 
briUiant as they once were, are presumed to be 
"boozed," "tanked," "burnt out," "bust-up," 
and otherwise consumed. 

After having heard for so many years the 
reminiscences of my good friend about the old 



Other Impossibilities 249 

gang, it seemed almost incredible that one of 
them should step into actual Hving being before 
my eyes. Yet so it happened. 

I found Mr. Sims at the club one day, about 
to lunch there, a thing contrary to his wont. 
And with him was a friend, a sallow, insignificant 
man in the middle fifties, with ragged, sandy 
hair, wearing thin. 

"Shake hands with Tommy Vidal," said Mr. 
Sims proudly. 

If he had said, "Shake hands with Aristotle," 
he couldn't have spoken with greater pride. 

This then was Tommy Vidal, the intellectual 
giant of whom I had heard a hundred times. 
Tonimy had, at college, so Mr. Sims had often 
assured me, the brightest mind known since the 
age of Pericles. He took the prize in Latin poetry 
absolutely "without opening a book." Latin to 
Tommy Vidal had been, by a kind of natural 
gift, bom in him. In Latin he was "a whale." 
Indeed in everything. He had passed his gradua- 
tion examination with first class honours, "plas- 
tered." He had to be held in his seat, so it was 
recorded, while he wrote. 

Tommy, it seemed, had just "blown in" to 
town that morning. It was characteristic of Mr. 
Sims's idea of the old gang that the only way in 



250 The Hohenzollerns in America 

which any of them were supposed to enter a town 
was to "blow in." 

"When did you say you ^blew in/ Tommy?" 
he asked about half a dozen times during our 
lunch. In reahty, the reckless, devil-may-care 
fellow Vidal had "blown in" to bring his second 
daughter to a boarding school — a thing no 
doubt contemplated months ahead. But Mr. 
Sims insisted in regarding Tommy's movements 
as purely fortuitous, the sport of chance. He 
varied his question by asking "When do you expect 
to ^blow out' Tommy?" Tommy's answers he 
forgot at once. 

We sat and talked after lunch, and it pained 
me to notice that Tommy Vidal was restless and 
anxious to get away. Mr. Sims offered him 
cigars, thick as ropes and black as night, but he 
refused them. It appeared that he had long 
since given up smoking. It affected his eyes, he 
said. The deferential waiter brought brandy 
and curagoa in long thin glasses. But Mr. Vidal 
shook his head. He hadn't had a drink, he said, 
for twenty years. He found it affected his hear- 
ing. Coffee, too, he refused. It affected, so it 
seemed, his sense of smell. He sat beside us, ill 
at ease, and anxious, as I could see, to get back 
to his second daughter and her schoolmistresses. 



Other Impossibilities 251 

Mr. Sims, who is geniality itself in his heart, but 
has no great powers in conversation, would ask 
Tommy if he remembered how he acted as An- 
tigone in the college play, and was "plastered" 
from the second act on. Mr. Vidal had no 
recollection of it, but wondered if there was any 
good book-store in town where he could buy his 
daughter an Algebra. He rose when he decently 
could and left us. As Mr. Sims saw it, he "blew 
out." 

Mr. Sims is kindliness itself in his judgments. 
He passed no word of censure on his departed 
friend. But a week or so later he mentioned to 
me in conversation that Tommy Vidal had 
"turned into a kind of stiff." The vocabulary of 
Mr. Sims holds no term of deeper condemnation 
than the word "stiff." To be a "stiff" is the 
last form of degradation. 

It is strange that when a thing happens once, 
it forthwith happens twice or even more. For 
years no member of the "old gang" had come in 
touch with Mr. Sims. Yet the visit of Tommy 
Vidal was followed at no great distance of time 
by the "blowing in" of Ned Purvis. 

"Well, well!" said Mr. Sims, as he opened one 
afternoon a telegram that the deferential waiter 
brought upon a tray. "This beats all! Old Ned 



252 The Hohenzollerns in America 

Purvis wires that he's going to blow in to town 
to-night at seven/' 

Forthwith Mr. Sims fell to ordering dinner for 
the three of us in a private room, with enough of 
an assortment of gin cocktails and Scotch highballs 
to run a distillery, and enough Vichy water and 
imported soda for a bath. ''I know old NedT' 
he said as he added item after item to the list. 

At seven o'clock the waiter whispered, as in 
deep confidence, that there was a gentleman 
below for Mr. Sims. 

It so happened that on that evening my friend's 
foot was in bad shape, and rested on a chair. 
At his request I went from the lounge room of 
the club downstairs to welcome the new arrival. 

Purvis I knew all about. My friend had 
spoken of him a thousand times. He had played 
haK-back on the football team — a big hulking 
brute of a fellow. In fact, he was, as pictured by 
Mr. Sims, a perfect colossus. And he played 
footbaU — as did all Mr. Sims's college chums — 
"plastered." "Old Ned," so Mr. Sims would 
relate, "was pretty well ^soused' when the game 
started: but we put a Rose at him at half-time 
and got him into pretty good shape." All men 
in any keen athletic contest, as remembered by 
Mr. Sims, were pretty well "tanked up." For 



Other Impossibilities 253 

the lighter, nimbler games such as tennis, they 
were reported ''spifflocated^' and in that shape 
performed prodigies of agihty. 

^'You'U know Ned,'^ said Mr. Sims, "by his 
big shoulders." I went downstairs. 

The reception room below was empty, except 
for one man, a Httle, gentle-looking man with 
spectacles. He wore black clothes with a waist- 
coat reaching to the throat, a white tie and a 
collar buttoned on backwards. Ned Purvis was 
a clergyman! His great hulking shoulders had 
gone the way of all my good friend's reminiscences. 

I brought him upstairs. 

For a moment, in the half light of the room, 
Mr. Sims was still deceived. 

"Well, Ned!" he began heartily, with a struggle 
to rise from his chair — then he saw the collar 
and tie of the Rev. Mr. Purvis, and the full horror 
of the thing dawned upon him. Nor did the 
three gin cocktails, which Mr. Sims had had 
stationed ready for the reunion, greatly help its 
geniality. Yet it had been a maxim, in the 
recollections ' of Mr. Sims, that when any of the 
boys blew in anywhere the bringing of drinks 
must be instantaneous and uproarious. 

Our dinner that night was very quiet. 

Mr. Purvis drank only water. That, with a 



254 The Hohenzollerns in America 

little salad, made his meal. He had a meeting to 
address that evening at eight, a meeting of women 
— "dear women" he called them — who had 
recently aJB&Hated their society with the work that 
some of the dear women in Mr. Purvis's own 
town were carrying on. The work, as described, 
boded no good for breweries. Mr. Purvis's wife, 
so it seemed, was with him and would also "take 
the platform." 

As best we could we made conversation. 

"I didn't know that you were married," said 
Mr. Sims. 

"Yes," said Mr. Purvis, "married, and with 
five dear boys and three dear girls." The eight 
of them, he told us, were a great blessing. So, 
too, was his wife — a great social worker, it 
seemed, in the cause of women's rights and a 
marvellous platform speaker in the temperance 
crusade. 

"By the way, Mr. Sims," said Mr. Purvis 
(they had called one another "Mr." after the 
first five minutes), "you may remember my wife. 
I think perhaps you knew her in our college days. 
She was a Miss Dashaway." 

Mr. Sims bowed his head over his plate, as 
another of his lost illusions vanished into thin 
air. 



Other Impossibilities ^55 

After Mr. Purvis had gone, my friend spoke 
out his mind — once and once only, and more 
in regret than anger. 

"I'm afraid," he said, "that old Ned has 
turned into a SISSY." 

It was only to be expected that the visits of 
later friends — the "boys" who happened to 
"blow in" — were disappointments. Art Hamil- 
ton, who came next, and who had been one of the 
most briUiant men of the Class of '86 had turned 
somehow into a "complete mutt." Jake Todd, 
who used to write so brilliantly in the college 
paper, as recollected by Mr. Sims, was now the 
editor of a big New York daily. Good things 
might have been expected of him, but it transpired 
that he had undergone "wizening of the brain." 
In fact, a number of Mr. Sims's former friends 
had suffered from this cruel disease, consisting 
apparently of a shrinkage or contraction of the 
cerebellum. 

Mr. Sims spoke little of his disappointments. 
But I knew that he thought much about them. 
They set him wondering. There were changes 
here that to the thoughtful mind called for 
investigation. 

So I was not surprised when he informed me 
that it was his intention to visit "the old place" 



^56 The Hohenzollerns in America 

and have a look at it. The "old place/ ^ called 
also the "old shop/' indicated, as I knew, Mr. 
Sims's college, the original scene of the exploits 
of the old gang. In the thirty years since he had 
graduated, though separated from it only by two 
hundred miles, Mr. Sims had never revisited it. 
So is it always with the most faithful of the sons 
of learning. The illumination of the inner eye is 
better than the crude light of reahty. CoUege 
reunions are but for the noisy Hp service of the 
shallow and the interested. The deeper affection 
glows in the absent heart. 

My friend invited me to "come along." We 
would, he said, "blow in" upon the place and 
have a look at it. 

It was in the fullness of the spring time that 
we went, when the leaves are out on the coUege 
campus, and when Commencement draws near, and 
when aU the college, even the students, are busy. 

Mr. Sims, I noted when I joined him at the 
train, was dressed as for the occasion. He wore 
a round straw hat with a coloured ribbon, and 
Hght grey suit, and a necktie with the garish 
colours of the coUege itself. Thus dressed, he 
leaned as Hghtly as his foot allowed him upon a 
yellow stick, and dreamed himself again an 
undergraduate. 



Other Impossibilities 257 

I had thought the purpose of his visit a mere 
curiosity bred in his disappointment. It appeared 
that I was wrong. On the train Mr. Sims im- 
folded to me that his idea in "blowing in" upon 
his college was one of benefaction. He had it in 
his mind, he said, to do something for the "old 
place," no less a thing than to endow a chair. 
He explained to me, modestly as was his wont, 
the origin of his idea. The brewing business, it 
appeared, was rapidly reaching a stage when it 
would have to be wound up. The movement of 
prohibition would necessitate, said Mr. Sims, the 
closmg of the plant. The prospect, in the finan- 
cial sense, occasioned my friend but little excite- 
ment. I was given to understand that prohibi- 
tion, in the case of Mr. Sims's brewery, had long 
since been "written off" or "written up" or at 
least written somewhere where it didn't matter. 
And the movement itself Mr. Sims does not 
regard as permanent. Prohibition, he says, is 
bound to be washed out by a "turn of the tide"; 
in fact, he speaks of this returning wave of moral 
regeneration much as Martin Luther might have 
spoken of the protestant Reformation. But for 
the time being the brewery will close. Mr. Sims 
had thought deeply, it seemed, about putting 
his surplus funds into the manufacture of com- 



258 The Hohenzollerns in America 

mercial alcohol, itself a noble profession. For 
some time his mind has wavered between that 
and endowing a chair of philosophy. There is, 
and always has been, a sort of natural connection 
between the drinking of beer and deep quiet 
thought. Mr. Sims, as a brewer, felt that philos- 
ophy was the proper thing. 

We left the train, walked through the little 
town and entered the university gates. 

"Gee!" said Mr. Sims, pausing a moment and 
leaning on his stick, "were the gates only as big 
as that?" 

We began to walk up the avenue. 

"I thought there were more trees to it than 
these," said Mr. Sims. 

"Yes," I answered. "You often said that the 
avenue was a quarter of a mile long." 

"So the thing used to be," he murmured. 

Then Mr. Sims looked at the campus. "A 
dinky looking Httle spot," he said. 

"Didn't you say," I asked, "that the Arts 
Building was built of white marble?" 

"Always thought it was," he answered. 
"Looks like rough cast from here, doesn't it." 

"We'll have to go in and see the President, I 
suppose," continued Mr. Sims. He said it with 
regret. Something of his undergraduate soul 



Other Impossibilities 259 

had returned to his body. Although he had 
never seen the President (this one) in his Hfe, 
and had only read of his appointment some five 
years before in the newspapers, Mr. Sims was 
afraid of him. 

"Now, I tell you," he went on. "We'll just 
make a break in and then a quick get-away. 
Don't let's get anchored in there, see? If the old 
fellow gets talking, he'U go on for ever. I remem- 
ber the way it used to be when a fellow had to go 
in to see Prexy in my time. The old guy would 
start mooning away and quoting Latin and keep 
us there haK the morning." 

At this moment two shabby-looking, insig- 
nificant men who had evidently come out from 
one of the buildings, passed us on the sidewalk. 

"I wonder who those guys are," said Mr. Sims. 
"Look like bums, don't they?" 

I shook my head. Some instinct told me that 
they were professors. But I didn't say so. 

My friend continued his instructions. 

"When the President asks us to lunch," he said, 
"I'll say that we're lunching with a friend down 
town, see? Then we'll make a break and get out. 
If he says he wants to introduce us to the Faculty 
or anything like that, then you say that we have 
to get the twelve-thirty to New York, see? I'm 



260 The Hohenzollerns in America 

not going to say anything about a chair in philoso- 
phy to-day. I want to read it up first some night 
so as to be able to talk about it." 

To all of this I agreed. 

From a janitor we inquired where to find the 
President. 

"In the Administration Building, eh?" said 
Mr. Sims. "That's a new one on me. The 
building on the right, eh? Thank you." 

"See the President?" said a young lady in an 
ante-office. "I'm not sure whether you can see 
him just now. Have you an appointment?" 

Mr. Sims drew out a card. "Give him that," 
he said. On the card he had scribbled " Graduate 
of 1887." 

In a few minutes we were shown into another 
room where there was a young man, evidently 
the President's secretary, and a number of people 
waiting. 

"Will you kindly sit down," murmured the 
young man, in a consulting-room voice, "and 
wait? The President is engaged just now." 

We waited. Through the inner door leading 
to the President people went and came. Mr. 
Sims, speaking in whispers, continued to caution 
me on the quickness of our get-away. 

Presently the young man touched him on the 
shoulder. 



Other Impossibilities 261 

"The President will see you now," he whispered. 

We entered the room. The "old guy" rose to 
meet us, Mr. Sims's card in his hand. But he was 
not old. He was at least ten years younger than 
either of us. He was, in fact, what Mr. Sims and 
I would almost have called a boy. In dress and 
manner he looked as spruce and busy as the 
salesmanager of a shoe factory. 

"Dehghted to see you, gentlemen," he said, 
shaking hands effusively. ' * We are always pleased 
to see our old graduates, Mr. Simpson — No, I 
beg pardon, Mr. Sims — class of '97, I see — 
No, I beg your pardon, Class of '67, I read it 
wrongly — " 

I heard Mr. Sims murmuring something that 
seemed to contain the words "a look around." 

"Yes, yes, exactly," said the President. "A 
look round, you'll find a great deal to interest 
you in looking about the place, I'm sure, Mr. 
Simpson, great changes. I'm extremely sorry 
I can't offer to take you round myself," here he 
snapped a gold watch open and shut, "the truth 
is I have to catch the twelve-thirty to New York 
— so sorry." 

Then he shook our hands again, very warmly. 

In another moment we were outside the door. 
The get-away was accomplished. 



262 The Hohenzollerns in America 

We walked out of the building and towards the 
avenue. 

As we passed the portals of the Arts Building, a 
noisy, rackety crowd of boys — evidently, to our 
eyes, schoolboys — came out, jostling and shout- 
ing. They swarmed past us, accidentally, no 
doubt, body-checking Mr. Sims, whose straw hat 
was knocked off and rolled on the sidewalk. A 
janitor picked it up for him as the crowd of boys 
passed. 

"What pack of young bums are those?" asked 
Mr. Sims. "You oughtn't to let young roughs 
like that come into the buildings. Are they here 
from some school or something?" 

"No sir," said the janitor. "They^re stu- 
dents." 

"Students?" repeated Mr. Sims. "And what 
are they shouting like that for?" 

"There's a notice up that their professor is ill, 
and so the class is cancelled, sir." 

"Class!" said Mr. Sims. "Are those a class?" 

"Yes, sir," said the janitor. "That's the 
Senior Class in Philosophy." 

Mr. Sims said nothing. He seemed to limp 
more than his custom as we passed down the 
avenue. 

On the way home on the train he talked much 



Other Impossibilities 263 

of crude alcohol and the possibilities of its com- 
mercial manufacture. 

So far as I know, his only benefaction up to 
date has been the two dollars that he gave to a 
hackman to drive us away, from the college. 



6. — Fetching the Doctor: 

From Recollections of Childhood in the Canadian 
Countryside 



WE lived far back in the country, such 
as it used to be in Canada, before 
the days of telephones and motor 
cars, with long lonely roads and snake fences 
buried in deep snow, and with cedar swamps 
where the sleighs could hardly pass two abreast. 
Here and there, on a winter night, one saw the 
light in a farm house, distant and dim. 

Over it all was a great silence such as people 
who hve in the cities can never know. 

And on us, as on the other famihes of that 
lonely countryside, there sometimes fell the 
sudden alarm of illness, and the hurrying drive 
through the snow at night to fetch the doctor 
from the village, seven miles away. 

My elder brother and I — there was a long 
tribe of us, as with all country famihes — would 
hitch up the horse by the Hght of the stable 
lantern, eager with haste and sick with fear, 
counting the time till the doctor could be there. 

Then out into the driving snow, urging the 

264 



Other Impossibilities ^Q5 

horse that knew by instinct that something was 
amiss, and so mile after mile, till we rounded the 
corner into the single street of the silent village. 

Late, late at night it was — eleven o'clock, 
perhaps — and the village dark and deep in sleep, 
except where the light showed red against the 
blinds of the "Surgery" of the doctor's rough- 
cast house behind the spruce trees. 

"Doctor,'' we cried, as we burst in, "hurry 
and come. Jim's ill — " 

I can see him still as he sat there in his surgery, 
the burly doctor, rugged and strong for all the 
sixty winters that he carried. There he sat 
playing chess — always he seemed to be playing 
chess — with his son, a medical student, burly 
and rugged already as himself. 

"Shut the door, shut the door!" he called. 
"Come in, boys; here, let me brush that snow off 
you — it's my move Charlie, remember — now, 
what the devil's the matter?" 

Then we would pant out our hurried excla- 
mations, both together. 

"Bah!" he growled, "ill nothing! Mere belly 
ache, I guess." 

That was his term, his favorite word, for an 
undiagnosed disease — "belly ache." They call 
it supergastral aesthesia now. In a city house. 



266 The Hohenzollerns in America 

it sounds better. Yet how we hung upon the 
doctor's good old Saxon term, yearning and hoping 
that it might be that. 

But even as he growled the doctor had taken 
down a lantern from a hook, thrown on a huge, 
battered fur coat that doubled his size, and was 
putting medicines — a very shopful it seemed — 
into a leather case. 

"Your horse is done up," he said. "We'll put 
my mare in. Come and give me a hand, Charhe.'' 

He was his own hostler and stable-man, he 
and his burly son. Yet how quickly and quietly 
he moved, the lantern swinging on his arm, as 
he buckled the straps. "What kind of a damn 
fool tug is this youVe got?'' he would say. 

Then, in a moment, as it seemed, out into the 
wind and snow again, the great figure of the doctor 
almost fiUing the seat of the cutter, the two of 
us crushed in beside him, with responsibility, 
the unbearable burden, gone from us, and re- 
newed comfort in our hearts. 

Little is said on the way: our heads are bent 
against the storm: the long stride of the doctor's 
mare eats up the flying road. 

Then as we near the farm house and see the 
Hght in the sick-room window, fear clutches our 
hearts again. 



Other Impossibilities 267 

"You boys unhitch," says the doctor. "I^U 
go right in.'' 

Presently, when we enter the house, we find 
that he is in the sick-room — the door closed. 
No word of comfort has come forth. He has 
sent out for hot blankets. The stoves are to be 
kept burning. We must sit up. We may be 
needed. That is all. 

And there in that still room through the long 
night, he fights single-handed against Death. 
Behind him is no human help, no consultation, 
no wisdom of the colleges to call in; only his own 
unaided strength, and his own firm purpose and 
that strange instinct in the fight for a flickering 
life, that some higher power than that of colleges 
has planted deep within his soul. 

So we watch through the night hours, in dull 
misery and fear, a phantom at the window pane: 
so must we wait till the slow morning shows dim 
and pale at the windows. 

Then he comes out from the room. His face 
is furrowed with the fatigue of his long vigil. But 
as he speaks the tone of his voice is as that of one 
who has fought and conquered. 

"There — he'll do now. Give him this when 
he wakes." 

Then a great joy sweeps over us as the phantom 



268 The Hohenzollerns in America 

flees away, and we shudder back into the warm 
sunshine of life, while the sound of the doctor's 
retreating sleighbells makes music to our ears. 

And once it was not so. The morning dawned 
and he did not come from the darkened room: 
only there came to our listening ears at times the 
sound of a sob or moan, and the doctor's voice, 
firm and low, but with all hope gone from it. 

And when at last he came, his face seemed old 
and sad as we had never seen it. He paused a 
moment on the threshold and we heard him say, 
^^I have done all that I can." Then he beckoned 
us into the darkened room, and, for the first 
time, we knew Death. 

All that is forty years ago. 

They tell me that, since then, the practice of 
medicine has been vastly improved. There are 
specialists now, I understand, for every conceiv- 
able illness and for every subdivision of it. If 
I fall ill, there is a whole battery of modern 
science to be turned upon me in a moment. 
There are X-rays ready to penetrate me in all 
directions. I may have any and every treatment 
— hypnotic, therapeutic or thaumaturgic — for 
which I am able to pay. 



Other Impossibilities 269 

But, oh, my friends, when it shall come to be 
my lot to be ill and stricken — in the last and 
real sense, with the Great Fear upon me, and the 
Dark Phantom at the pane — then let some one 
go, fast and eager — though it be only in the 
paths of an expiring memory — fast and eager, 
through the driving snow to bring him to my 
bedside. Let me hear the sound of his hurr3dng 
sleighbells as he comes, and his strong voice 
without the door — and, if that may not be, then 
let me seem at least to feel the clasp of his firm 
hand to guide me without fear to the Land of 
Shadows, where he has gone before. 



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